Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland • Hacker News Board

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#41

Post by StavrosK » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

donclark wrote: post #40

StavrosK wrote: post #6

I've been using Plaid for a toy project for a while, and, while it works well, what surprised me the most was their support. I had an issue with my bank not sending me SMS and their support was quick and helpful, responding to my problem with actual feedback rather than canned responses. Now that I'm saying this, I realize what a low bar our current support climate has set, but Plaid is great on that regardless.

Would something like this address your sms finance communications? https://www.asktrim.com/ I use it to get notifications on charges and I can check my balance.

The problem was that my bank couldn't send me the authentication SMS so I can't log in to Plaid, it wasn't about notifications. Thank you for the recommendation, though.

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#42

Post by hidiegomariani » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

masterjack wrote: post #38

What is Plaid's long-term competitive advantage? It made sense when scraping was the only solution (albeit an extremely dangerous one) but now banks are launching their own APIs, which is allowing some competitors to come in with free bank account linking. A few simple features address most of the needs of a typical fintech, and I don't think anyone is happy with having to integrate Plaid's SDK nor pay their rates.

bank's APIs are extremely limited as of right now. Fragmentation is also very high. It is also true that this may change in the future, but not very soon

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#43

Post by manacit » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

masterjack wrote: post #38

What is Plaid's long-term competitive advantage? It made sense when scraping was the only solution (albeit an extremely dangerous one) but now banks are launching their own APIs, which is allowing some competitors to come in with free bank account linking. A few simple features address most of the needs of a typical fintech, and I don't think anyone is happy with having to integrate Plaid's SDK nor pay their rates.

It might be a few simple features, but it's a few simple features for every single bank in the USA (or in the EU), which is an absolutely huge number of them.

It's a marginal amount of work to link against a few big banks that have solid APIs, but once you get to the BECUs and the SESLOCs of the world, this gets much more difficult. Imagine doing this globally, and I think it's an even taller task.

The EU has been working on PSD2, which might make this less valuable, but there's still a long run way (IMO) where Plaid can quickly become the default choice for anyone who wants to link against banking APIs.

Beyond that, the network effect means that Plaid will likely eventually get to broker individual relationships with banks and be able to move into dictating more of the market in the long run, putting them in a position of strength.

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#44

Post by masterjack » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

hidiegomariani wrote: post #42

masterjack wrote: post #38

What is Plaid's long-term competitive advantage? It made sense when scraping was the only solution (albeit an extremely dangerous one) but now banks are launching their own APIs, which is allowing some competitors to come in with free bank account linking. A few simple features address most of the needs of a typical fintech, and I don't think anyone is happy with having to integrate Plaid's SDK nor pay their rates.

bank's APIs are extremely limited as of right now. Fragmentation is also very high. It is also true that this may change in the future, but not very soon

Fragmentation is definitely high. Although if you can seamlessly fall back to other services, a handful of bank integrations can get you ~80% of the customers.

I haven't worked with Open Banking, how is it? In the US, for bank transfers, NACHA files are fairly easy to work with, as long as you can access and verify bank account numbers (ideally get balance and identity information too). I think all the APIs support this, eg: https://developer.wellsfargo.com/apis/payments/account-valid...

It's hard to tell how quickly things will change and improve. Banks should have an incentive to work on this, since it will give them more control of their data and logins, potentially lowering liabilities and hack potential.

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#45

Post by willy_ph » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #36

Something I've always worried about: if I provide my bank's login credentials to a service which uses Plaid/Yodlee and due to a security breach my bank account is somehow drained, who's liable? Most banks explicitly state that losses due to sharing of credentials are not protected by their fraud guarantees. Are customers at risk by using Plaid?

You're likely on the hook for the losses having shared your creds. May obviously vary from FI to FI.

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#46

Post by whitepoplar » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:45 PM UTC

willy_ph wrote: post #45

whitepoplar wrote: post #36

Something I've always worried about: if I provide my bank's login credentials to a service which uses Plaid/Yodlee and due to a security breach my bank account is somehow drained, who's liable? Most banks explicitly state that losses due to sharing of credentials are not protected by their fraud guarantees. Are customers at risk by using Plaid?

You're likely on the hook for the losses having shared your creds. May obviously vary from FI to FI.

If that's the case, why aren't FI's going after Plaid for impersonating their branding/login screens? When you go to link an account in-app, for instance, there is no indication that you're using Plaid; you're presented with a login screen that matches your FI's color scheme + branding. In fact, it's even more on-brand than the FI's own login screens, sometimes!

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#47

Post by JonoBB » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:46 PM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #36

Something I've always worried about: if I provide my bank's login credentials to a service which uses Plaid/Yodlee and due to a security breach my bank account is somehow drained, who's liable? Most banks explicitly state that losses due to sharing of credentials are not protected by their fraud guarantees. Are customers at risk by using Plaid?

Not in the EU anymore due to PSD2

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#48

Post by mijoharas » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 11:47 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #15

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks Europe for using regulation (PSD2) to open up banking to fintech startups. Would anyone be interested in joining me in championing similar legislation in the US through congressional representatives, the Federal Reserve, and FDIC?

I don't know PSD2 fully but I know that my bank rolled out support for it and as far as I gather, applications should not have to ask for my username/password via their own UI (which after testing Plaid, they do), but rather use the authentication systems from the banks to authenticate. Maybe I used it wrong though.

FYI, a lot of banks open banking apis are broken most of the time.

Having said that, for plaid in the UK, they do offer both an open banking integration and a scraping integration for most banks.

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#49

Post by sitharus » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #36

Something I've always worried about: if I provide my bank's login credentials to a service which uses Plaid/Yodlee and due to a security breach my bank account is somehow drained, who's liable? Most banks explicitly state that losses due to sharing of credentials are not protected by their fraud guarantees. Are customers at risk by using Plaid?

My bank has explicitly told me that using Pliad/Yodlee violates their T&Cs and voids their entire online fraud protection, regardless of if one of those services is at fault.

Re: Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland

#50

Post by nikolay » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 1:25 AM UTC

Plaid should be sued by asking people to disable their 2FA! For example, Bank of America and Wells Fargo provide APIs, but Plaid is not using them - instead, they advise me to turn off my 2FA just so that they can steal my banking data. They should be out of business. It's not 2000, it's 2019! Not to mention, their service is SOOO expensive!