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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

#171

Post by Terretta »

mikeodds wrote: post #165
sangnoir wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That could easily be a lawyer-speak official statement.

They say “personal information”. That is consumer-facing language for something which in banking has a legally (regulation) defined term: “PII” or personally identifiable information:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/personally-identifiable...

It can be argued that lists of money spent at stores cannot be reversed back to a person without other information. So they might not consider your transactions PII.

As for the consent, the TOS click wrap generally gets your consent, in the part where firms mumble about “our partners” for “legitimate uses” or etc. while bucketing various data brokers in that class.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#172

Post by webmaven »

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…

> Startups die all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but "large company started competing with it" is a rather rare one.

Currently rare, but as with other aspects of the market for startups, it is irregularly cyclical. Not too long ago Google accidentally killed startups every so often when they launched a product or service (the examples that particularly stick in my mind are Kiko - killed by the launch of Google Calendar in 2006, and Autumn AI, killed by Tensorflow around 2016). Go back to the pre-www days and Microsoft killed startups regularly, seemingly as a competitive sport. A reasonably entertaining account of one such is Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, by Jerry Kaplan, founder of Go Corporation:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Startup.html?id=UK7qDwA...

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#174

Post by doktorhladnjak »

itslennysfault wrote: post #113
darkerside wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs are literally paid to deal with these emotions constructively. In this case, that would have looked like welcoming a competitor to the space and being ready to win on execution, because ideas are free.

A prime example of this is the response Slack gave when Microsoft launched Teams. It was a direct copy-cat and they didn't throw a temper tantrum. They welcomed Microsoft into the space and saw it as validation of their product.

That may have been true at first but then why did they go to the EU antitrust regulator with a complaint?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/22/slack-accuses-microsoft-of-a...

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#175

Post by darkerside »

jonny_eh wrote: post #152
darkerside wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any sufficiently good idea is really hard to communicate but really easy to demonstrate. That means you get a head start, but the next person gets it for free. That head start is your time to build a business with a moat. If you haven't done it by then, the next person will.

> Any sufficiently good idea There are all sorts of good ideas. Some are easy to communicate, some demonstrate, some both, some neither.

They're not sufficiently good for my theorem!

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#176

Post by dylan604 »

endisneigh wrote: post #169
dylan604 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's the same state of mind. Some one unwares trying to be helpful.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#177

Post by smugma »

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…

Companies fail all the time when large companies start to compete with them. Microsoft was famous for this in the 90s. The biggest example that comes to mind is Netscape.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#178

Post by jjeaff »

pbreit wrote: post #145
chrisseaton wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't it done through a proper API that you grant them a token for? And how do Plaid bypass your bank's per-login 2FA if they're logging in as is they were a user?

Because not many banks have such an API. Plaid just relays the 2FA question. I think websites would have a tough time preventing users from sharing username/password. It would certainly be acceptable in a power of attorney situation.

Not only do they relay the login and 2fa information, they even show the login as a window with company colors and branding as if you were logging in to your bank directly.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#179

Post by SnowHill9902 »

mbesto wrote: post #160
SnowHill9902 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideas are not free. Good execution is better than good ideas alone, true. But ideas can definitely be worth a lot.

Is there an eBay/Amazon for ideas? Didn't think so. Ideas are worthless.

RSA was once just an idea without an implementation. Would you say it was worthless? Why was it published then?

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#180

Post by jjeaff »

milesskorpen wrote: post #129
sangnoir wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The class action was settled — which just means it was cheaper to settle than to fight in court, not that there was wrong doing. This kind of thing is very very common, and the settlement amount was modest in the scheme of class action settlements. Plaid is pretty clear in their privacy policy that they DO NOT repackage and resell data (they do sell data - as in, when you use Plaid to give your banking info to a mort…

I think you will rarely see a class action settlement for a complaint with zero merit. Otherwise, you would be getting a tiny class action check in your mailbox every week for every company that prefers to settle rather than fight.

Do you also believe that Bill O'Reilly and Fox News paid out $30m+ even though he didn't do anything? After all, they admitted no wrong doing in the settlements.

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