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Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

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Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#161

Post by mbesto »

eins1234 wrote: post #91

A lot of comments here saying that this is the death knell for Plaid, but I wouldn't be so sure. Stripe has launched competitors to existing fintech products and failed to gain traction plenty of times before. Example: Remember the Stripe Corporate Card? It was "launched" as invite-only 3 years ago and is still invite only today, with little signs of traction. Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorns throug…

> A lot of comments here saying that this is the death knell for Plaid, but I wouldn't be so sure.

The fact that no one has mentioned Yodlee once makes me think very few people in this thread actually know this market.

Not to mention there are probably quite literally thousands of Stripe competitors.

The world is a big place and the SV bubblethink of "only one person wins" is highly myopic.

Plaid will be fine. They just might not be $10B valuation fine. That's all.

EDIT: Doh, saw Yodlee mentioned once much lower in thread now.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#162

Post by dang »

endisneigh wrote: post #4

I’ll never get over how regressive it is that we are literally clicking on images filled with text as a way to share… text. I seriously cringe each time, lol. Anyway, on topic, it’s good to see this little debacle behind them. Both stripe and plaid offer good services and competition is good in any case. I do wonder if there’s some room for innovation here from Google and Apple. It would be interesting to see if it’s…

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#163

Post by phoenixy1 »

goleary wrote: post #9
iambateman wrote: post #2

This is a good, helpful response! As an aside, I’m excited to switch to Stripe’s transactions API from Plaid for MoneyHabitsHQ.com. Plaid’s security review process is “submit questionnaire and wait an unspecified amount of time.” I’m at five weeks of waiting and three help tickets and it’s been absolute silence.

Pretty sure I've been waiting 3+ months at this point and am now unable to connect new items via Chase.

That's really an excessive wait time, I'm sorry. We are working on better systematic approaches to this issue, but in the meantime, would you be willing to send me your info so I can look at what's going on with the ticket? You can DM @plaiddev on Twitter or email customer-feedback@plaid.com

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#164

Post by astrange »

vmception wrote: post #69

The only thing I learned from this is that both companies have ways to connect directly to banks via API…. sometimes for some banks , sometimes and the consumer cant tell at any time.

It's pretty obvious, you go through an OAuth flow on the bank's website.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#165

Post by mikeodds »

sangnoir wrote: post #105
eins1234 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: Plaid itself, having used some of their competitors, specifically Finicity, which is one of Stripe's partners for this, I wouldn't be too worried if I were them. IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience.

> IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience. I regret handing over my bank login details to Plaid, since they scraped my bank statements without stating so upfront and offered that information to 3rd parties (indirectly, as a score of some sort, IIRC, but that's scraping very personal information). When I mentioned it on HN a year or 2 ago, someone who works…

I got the same answer from them on HN here 10 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27467797#27476452

Me: Always been curious - do you (Plaid) use the transaction data or any other data obtained from customers logins for anything other than the reason the customer supply’s their credentials? I.e if I use plaid to link to my Robin Hood account, do you in any way sell/share/use my data apart from allowing me to fund my Robin Hood account?

Response: Good question! No, we don't. Our official statement on this is at https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/ "Plaid only shares your data with your consent. We don’t share your personal information without your permission, and we don’t sell or rent it to outside companies."

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#166

Post by ergocoder »

lvl102 wrote: post #158
ergocoder wrote: post #156

I'm surprised that all the comments here are not about how Plaid CEO maliciously misled people. "Interview" turns out to be a job interview before Jay even joined Stripe back in 2014. Jay started working on this product in 2019. "RFP" turns out to be a regular RFP where Stripe wants to integrate with multiple partners like MX and finicity. In the past few years, Plaid CEO and Plaid requested meetings with Jay. Jay ne…

They’re both suspect in my view.

Can you point me to what Jay did wrong here?

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#167

Post by fishywang »

eins1234 wrote: post #94
eins1234 wrote: post #91

A lot of comments here saying that this is the death knell for Plaid, but I wouldn't be so sure. Stripe has launched competitors to existing fintech products and failed to gain traction plenty of times before. Example: Remember the Stripe Corporate Card? It was "launched" as invite-only 3 years ago and is still invite only today, with little signs of traction. Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorns throug…

Re: Plaid itself, having used some of their competitors, specifically Finicity, which is one of Stripe's partners for this, I wouldn't be too worried if I were them. IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience.

>IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience.

I don't know. Maybe their competitors are even worse? But as an end-user Plaid's experience is far from good.

In their current state I really don't have much control after I gave them my banking credentials. If they can actually implement an OAuth model for their paying customers (e.g. third parties using their API) to integrate, that would be much better. For example when I try some service first I can initially only give it access to one of my least important account, evaluate whether it's useful, before giving it more of my accounts, or revoke it access to all my accounts. I have none of those controls today.

I actually also interviewed with them several years ago, and mentioned the OAuth thing during my interview. But after all these years it's still not there. If I have to _guess_ why, I would guess they fear such a feature will make their paying customers (API users) less likely to use their product, e.g. their business model actually relies on the end users' lack of control.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#168

Post by endisneigh »

dang wrote: post #162
endisneigh wrote: post #4

I’ll never get over how regressive it is that we are literally clicking on images filled with text as a way to share… text. I seriously cringe each time, lol. Anyway, on topic, it’s good to see this little debacle behind them. Both stripe and plaid offer good services and competition is good in any case. I do wonder if there’s some room for innovation here from Google and Apple. It would be interesting to see if it’s…

" Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Given you can’t read the text if you use a screen reader I would hardly count this as an “annoyance”, plus the majority of my comment is on topic. So idk

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#169

Post by endisneigh »

dylan604 wrote: post #159
endisneigh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about validity, it’s about accessibility. For example in the image there’s a link which can’t be clicked because the info wasn’t included

Just pretend it's your mom bringing you a sheet of paper she printed of the website she wanted to show you, or worse, the ambitious mom that then rescanned the printout so she could email it to you.

But that’s not what’s happening. Why make a dumb scenario?

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#170

Post by ergocoder »

kelnos wrote: post #73
rabidonrails wrote: post #26

I think that people underestimate what this feels like for the Plaid founder and potentially for Patrick too. For Plaid you've spent your life building this business. Presumably there are many happy customers and you're working really hard to define the space and provide service. One morning you flip on your laptop and see a headline that one of your customers (and competitors) launched a new service that directly co…

Plaid is a huge company with a CEO who is presumably a professional adult. Making sarcastic, whiny commends on Twitter should be beneath him. He just sounds like a child throwing a tantrum because a company decided to compete with him. Not saying he shouldn't feel bad, or threatened, or upset -- those are perfectly valid feelings to have -- but airing those feelings like that is unprofessional and, frankly, pretty la…

Not only that. His tweet misled people.

"Interview" turns out to be a job interview Jay had in 2014 before Jay even joined Stripe.

Jay started working on this product in 2019.

This is malicious. Plaid CEO intended to character-assassinate Jay.

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