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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

#181

Post by dang »

endisneigh wrote: post #168
dang wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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

It's true that such things are annoying but they're so common and so annoying that they easily take over the discussion.

In the case of your comment, literally all of the replies were about the annoyance. Not one was about the on-topic portion of your comment; it might as well not have existed. That's why we have that guideline.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#182

Post by propogandist »

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…

change your bank account password, if you've ever used Plaid or any of the comparable services to verify your account, to prevent the scraping. They are constantly hitting bank accounts where they have access.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#183

Post by darkerside »

SnowHill9902 wrote: post #179
mbesto wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A defined specification is very different from an idea. RSA is a perfect example. I would say the "idea" here is public key cryptography. It was total genius when it was invented, and 99.999% of the world didn't care a lick.

Once it was implemented in several crypto systems, including RSA, and people started using it, the value became clear.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#184

Post by darkerside »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #174
itslennysfault wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Welcoming competition is different from approving of a competitor abusing their platform to sell only their own products. Note that I am not saying this is what Microsoft is doing, just saying that this is what Slack claims to believe they are doing.

IMO, their welcoming of competition, on an even playing field, only strengthens their request that Microsoft compete fairly.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#185

Post by Jcowell »

arinlen wrote: post #81
Jcowell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think OP isn’t asking for sympathy but empathy? Is this the name of the game ? Yeah it is , always has , always will be. Does it suck for the loser ? Yes for course.

> I don’t think OP isn’t asking for sympathy but empathy? Is this the name of the game ? Unless you believe a company like Plaid is entitled to a monopoly and should be free from any semblance of competition, I don't see a problem with that. What happened to free market capitalism?

It’s nothing about entitlement. It’s not a matter of whether stripe moving into the space is right or wrong. It’s about empathizing that when this kind of thing happens to a company the founder probably doesn’t feel too hot. You can try understand Plaid’s feelings right now while at the same time thinking Stripe is just doing what businesses will do.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#186

Post by ergocoder »

felixrieseberg wrote: post #5
koch wrote: post #3

What is the front page test he refers to (second image, last bullet point)?

It's a common test to ensure you're truly comfortable with your decisions and actions: If a major newspaper would describe your actions or quote you directly on their front page tomorrow, would you still stand behind those words and actions? The "test" is much older than Stripe but we often use it as a shorthand to ask ourselves whether we truly think a certain course of action is the right one.

It is a great principle. Great benefit, easy to upkeep

I have no idea why most companies don't install this principle since the beginning.

I basically assume every email and slack message would be public at some point.

It is a bit extreme but it doesn't require that much effort to maintain such principle.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#187

Post by kbos87 »

pbreit wrote: post #148
kbos87 wrote: post #33

I don’t know all the specifics of the interaction that happened here, but the hard truth is that if you aren’t eventually expecting this to happen to your business - regardless of the space you are in - you aren’t being realistic about the nature of competition in SaaS. Plaid has enjoyed years of life without much direct competition. My hunch is that few other businesses were interested in the space because it feels…

Well, Yodlee & Finicity pre-dated Plaid by many years. But Plaid executed much better.

Thank you for the education on the history here. That makes Plaid’s indignance about new competition even less palatable.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#188

Post by hitekker »

anon_3b4150 wrote: post #124
sbierwagen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>telling a third party that they should not do a hybrid Stripe + my_old_company solution because our product couldn't support the use case. To be clear, are you complaining about salesmen at a competitor lying to close a sale? Are you also unhappy about water being wet, or bears shitting in the woods?

No, that is not what happened. We were partnering with Stripe on a deal that we originated. They verbally agreed to terms. They then lied about our abilities. So we cut Stripe out, got the deal, and moved on. The point isn't that competition exists; the point is that Stripe will say one thing and do another. If this is how you live your life, fine, but many people would like to know that Stripe has a history of bad b…

Sam is either being intentionally obtuse or hasn't worked in a corporation. The idea that sales is the only department that can partner with other companies is just stupid.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#189

Post by ericlewis »

mbesto wrote: post #161
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 j…

As someone intimately familiar with the space Yodlee is often not mentioned for a few reasons. But their ability to handle the long tail of accounts is the biggest reason it’s often not considered. When you’re trying to maximize the ability for people to access your service (and require a bank account or related information to do so) there is really no comparison to plaid. Further, plaid long had a better developer experience than yodlee and for some amount of time was much cheaper (thanks to enterprise discounts in exchange for prominence in leading apps)in a few cases.

People likely aren’t familiar with yodlee and maybe it’s an indication they’re not aware of the space. But for those who are - I’d not have mentioned it either, they barely touch plaid on many facets.

Edit: I know in one particular instance we “considered” yodlee at what is now considered a big consumer banking unicorn. But in no way was actually considered. It was used as a negotiation tool.

Re: Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

#190

Post by mbesto »

ericlewis wrote: post #189
mbesto wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 j…

As someone intimately familiar with the space Yodlee is often not mentioned for a few reasons. But their ability to handle the long tail of accounts is the biggest reason it’s often not considered. When you’re trying to maximize the ability for people to access your service (and require a bank account or related information to do so) there is really no comparison to plaid. Further, plaid long had a better developer e…

> But their ability to handle the long tail of accounts is the biggest reason it’s often not considered.

According to a few google searches, this is simply not true:

Yodlee supports 14k banks and Plaid supports 11k banks

I personally have used Kubera as a consumer who use both Plaid and Yodlee to connect to banks. I have ~3 bank accounts (that represent great candidates for long tail) that simply do not work with EITHER service provider. Having spoken to the support staff from Kubera (who are great btw) they prefer to use Plaid for some of the reasons you mention, but not because its all encompassing.

Categorizing Yodlee as "they barely touch plaid" is simply disingenuous. Much of the functionality is comparable, it's just MUCH better on Plaid for both the developer and the consumer in terms of overall experience.

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