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Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

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Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#141

Post by RC_ITR »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #139
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

> takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it So does, for example, Yodlee, when you use them to have an API for bank statements. I cannot say if they too monetize the data that opens up to them for grabs. It took legislation and years of preparation to enforce APIs and interoperability onto European banks (yes, I can now use bank A's app to view my account balance in bank B, while maintaining contro…

Yodlee literally sells the data directly to hedge funds.

https://www.thetrustedinsight.com/investment-news/yodlee-jum...

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#142

Post by f430 »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #112
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

I am sure I will be called naive, but this is shocking to me. I assumed that Plaid was integrating with the banks and not doing this sort of thing because of the people associated with Plaid. Their seed round included Spark Capital and Google Ventures. Their most recent round included Mary Meeker and Andreessen Horowitz. [1] These investors have reputations to protect. This type of thing would certainly come out in d…

I don't think you are naive at all regarding this but generally people see famous people, name dropping and due diligence goes out the window.

There are people who take advantage of that and are very successful. Disgusting because it is just another form of deceiving people's trust.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#143

Post by f430 »

wh-uws wrote: post #14

Finally some antitrust enforcement! This was clearly going to be anti competitive and bad for consumers. Plaid has a great product and will either spac / ipo or be a great acquisition target for someone else.

Plaid broke the law and now someone can acquire it at a huge discount. They played themselves.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#144

Post by [deleted] »

smnrchrds wrote: post #82
seanieb wrote: post #75

I’ve some friends that works there, so I’m hesitant to say this, because I’m sorry for them, but Plaid is a terrible company. Their main product scrapes financial data from unsuspecting users that simply think they’re making a bank transfer and not signing away the privacy and security of their banking, 401k and trading information. https://twitter.com/seanieb/status/1298871471645761537?s=20

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

[deleted]

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#145

Post by tadfisher »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #112
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

I am sure I will be called naive, but this is shocking to me. I assumed that Plaid was integrating with the banks and not doing this sort of thing because of the people associated with Plaid. Their seed round included Spark Capital and Google Ventures. Their most recent round included Mary Meeker and Andreessen Horowitz. [1] These investors have reputations to protect. This type of thing would certainly come out in d…

I'm surprised, because Plaid is far from the first mover in the "scraped banking data API" space. Mint (now Intuit) and Yodlee come to mind, and they use essentially the same sign-in flow and come with the same limitations.

There are organizations and companies that are trying to do this legitimately, through open standards and real incentives to both FIs and customers to share information in exchanges:

- Open Banking Project: https://www.openbankproject.com/

- MX: https://www.mx.com/

P.S. Can we get real Markdown support already? The fact that the Markdown URL format isn't supported is extremely user-hostile.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#146

Post by ultimoo »

seanieb wrote: post #75

I’ve some friends that works there, so I’m hesitant to say this, because I’m sorry for them, but Plaid is a terrible company. Their main product scrapes financial data from unsuspecting users that simply think they’re making a bank transfer and not signing away the privacy and security of their banking, 401k and trading information. https://twitter.com/seanieb/status/1298871471645761537?s=20

This is so terrible. Is there an easy way for me to write to Plaid to delete all my information or do I have to go into each service and unlink?

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#147

Post by valtism »

chaorace wrote: post #47
paxys wrote: post #3

It would have gone through had Visa's CEO not been so honest at the time of the merger announcement saying that they intended to use Plaid's data to get a leg up on their competitors. > The DOJ cited Visa CEO Al Kelly’s description of the deal as an “insurance policy” to neutralize a “threat to our important US debit business.”

I don't even think it's a data issue. He literally says they bought Plaid because they're a threat. That's textbook anti-competitive behavior and a big smoking gun when it comes to anti-trust cases.

I'm not informed when it comes to anti-competitive legislation, but don't companies like Google do this sort of thing all the time?

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#148

Post by tadfisher »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #124
purple_ferret wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these banks never had any APIs. Plaid made its name basically scrapping the html of account pages. Companies used it because there were no alternatives (no apis)

I understand the situation. Another of Plaid's investors is Goldman Sachs. I naively assumed that Plaid's ability to build their product was likely based on access to private APIs available to them based on their relationships and backing. If someone came to me and asked me to build what Plaid has built, I would decline the work. I would assume that impersonating a bank would be illegal. I would assume that the banks…

Plaid does have real integrations with some institutions, using OAuth and the works. The list is relatively miniscule compared to the vast majority of institutions that still consider customer data their asset and not their customers'.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#149

Post by [deleted] »

f430 wrote: post #138
Judgmentality wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I adore the idea of the Plaid founders, and everyone else deemed complicit in a court of law (I think this should likely include investors), going to fuck-you-in-the-ass prison instead of becoming billionaires. Alas, I've lived in Silicon Valley too long to believe that anything moral will ever occur when there's money to be made. It makes me sad that people actually admire this place for anything other than the geog…

Do you think Plaid founders are going to jail?

[deleted]

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#150

Post by tadfisher »

xtracto wrote: post #94
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

That´s interesting, and it is an important "stick". On the other side, I know some banks are giving a "carrot" to these types of companies by providing a "portal access" that allows these companies to connect their customers with their bank accounts so that the customer can select what to share with these sites. Of course, once those portals are enabled we enter the Facebook game: Where a lot of customers will blindl…

This is essentially the core thesis of MX [1], which creates an API exchange that FIs need to join in order to use.

I'm not sure how well it is catching on. Seems like they're diversifying more into other whitelabel products for fintech companies.

[1]: https://www.mx.com/

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