Does anyone know if such a thing exists in Europe?
The original one (expensive): https://www.yodlee.com/yodlee/europe-africa UK startups: https://teller.io/ https://truelayer.com/
figo too perhaps
Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
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Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Co-founder of Plaid here. This is not true, we do not sell transactional data to third parties. We make 100% of our money by letting developers build financial applications[1]. [1] - https://plaid.com/pricing/
Thanks William, and sorry for the wrong accusation. Super embarrassed; I read so many comments on that thread I must've conflated two.
Thanks for speaking up alehul; for what it's worth, I think it can often be interesting to later reflect on these moments of apparent shame and embarrassment, especially in the context of attempting to speak truth to power.
Accountability and transparency is important long-term; as is questioning possible abuse or misuse of power. Don't be afraid to continue to do so!
Also, always use Hanlon's razor, but it's getting harder and harder to tell genuine conversations from stage-managed ones online, unfortunately. It's the logical extreme of pg's article 'The Submarine'[0].
Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#33I spoke to a young guy recently, who is doing a graduate/rotation with one of of the big US banks.
He was excited for the rotation in one of the (several) "moonshot divisions," with a goal of 10X-ing the bank in theory. I told him that I hope _giant bank_ doesn't have 10X growth in it, but...
... I think that any truly disruptive idea for fintech/banking is likely to be of the "turn a billion dollar company into a million dollar company" variety.
Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#34why doesn't Mint have is kind of valuation?
I guess I don't understand how they differ, I do get that they both rely on giving your bank credentials to a third party and that they both scrape your financial history.
Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Co-founder of Plaid here. This is not true, we do not sell transactional data to third parties. We make 100% of our money by letting developers build financial applications[1]. [1] - https://plaid.com/pricing/
Hi William, This may be true - but you do still normalize users to the practice of entering their banking login credentials into a web form which is sent to a third party (i.e. yourselves). In addition I believe the developer gains access to the users' bank transaction history - not just for the duration of their login session, but long-term, which is likely something that users aren't fully aware of in most cases. A…
I have my own issues with Plaid, but I think you’re reaching a bit here. Everything Plaid does is opt in by the end user. They’re not selling data unbeknownst to the user (assuming co-founder above is being genuine), the user is giving another service permission to use their data.
As for bank logins...that’s been around since long before Plaid. But I agree there must be a better way. Though I don’t have any great practical ideas.
Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#36Plaid is a great idea, but the implementation worries me. My understanding is that, for most banks, you give Plaid your username and password, and Plaid scrapers on their servers log into your online banking account. Even worse, Plaid obfuscates this behavior from users by replicating their banks login window and making it appear that you are logging directly into your bank. I'm not sure how to feel about this, becau…
That ... sounds like it violates every bank's ToS out there, and not the abusive buried-in-fine-print part, either. Every bank could, quite reasonably, cut off your access for this.
Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi William, This may be true - but you do still normalize users to the practice of entering their banking login credentials into a web form which is sent to a third party (i.e. yourselves). In addition I believe the developer gains access to the users' bank transaction history - not just for the duration of their login session, but long-term, which is likely something that users aren't fully aware of in most cases. A…
I have my own issues with Plaid, but I think you’re reaching a bit here. Everything Plaid does is opt in by the end user. They’re not selling data unbeknownst to the user (assuming co-founder above is being genuine), the user is giving another service permission to use their data. As for bank logins...that’s been around since long before Plaid. But I agree there must be a better way. Though I don’t have any great pra…
It's possible I'm overreaching, yep, but I think the past decade has shown - is showing - that simply 'assuming the best' of what will happen with rapid adoption of new technology isn't the most effective strategy. Daemons will come home to roost over time.
Even if users are technically opting in, and even if everything is documented in the privacy policy, a potential end-game here is that startup companies have access to all bank transactions for the people who need to use Plaid - likely people on the ground in the sharing economy who rely on it for payments - and the more fortunate/wealthier folks continue to have financial privacy by virtue of not needing to use it.
That would be a really unfair world to live in.
Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#38why doesn't Mint have is kind of valuation? I guess I don't understand how they differ, I do get that they both rely on giving your bank credentials to a third party and that they both scrape your financial history.
Mint is owned by Intuit, valued at 53.88B!
Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#39Does anyone know if such a thing exists in Europe?
Well, at least in Germany we kind of have the FinTS protocol to get at the data and don't have to scrape. So less need for an intermediary. I also saw something about EU regulations for bank APIs, but unfortunately not one common API.
Re: Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
#40Is the gist of this company logging into a bank's web service using a user's credentials and scraping their account data and exposing that data via APIs to other developers?
I thought they actually integrated with the banks on the backend, but if this is all they do, I'm not comfortable using any product that snoops my bank info without any accountability.