Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins • Hacker News Board

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#81

Post by pintxo » Wed, May 12, 2021, 11:22 AM UTC

wikibob wrote: post #42

imgabe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial institutions should all be required to provide API with various permissions so consumers can connect whatever 3rd party tools they want. Coinbase has a good API where you can specify read-only access to whichever accounts and wallets you want.

Look up PSD2. Exactly that is required in EU

And it's a net-negative for everyone not using any such service. The UX for my online banking has gone down significantly. Banks require now a lot of additional 2fa authorizations for various actions, even when you are already authenticated.

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#82

Post by rendaw » Wed, May 12, 2021, 11:48 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #77

rendaw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing this for a couple years, just with Selenium rather than Puppeteer. Banks are generally okay, and they don't change their websites that often which is nice. A couple banks force phone 2FA and deliberately hide the "email confirmation" option which makes full automation difficult. Also nag screens, Selenium unreliability, etc. Some companies like Azure use a different account name every time they bill m…

You're doing this for personal or business expenses? I'm curious to check this out, do you have a GitHub repo/account?

Personal, and no repo at the moment. The code is a huge mess, from scattered multiple generations of wrappers around Selenium's "click this element" functionality to custom accounting code to bit rotted parsers for old receipt email formats, etc. My thinking was largely "as long as I have the data I can make the code better later" and that later has yet to come. I don't have any passwords in the code at least but I think I do have email address whitelists/blacklists for email management stuff and lists of merchants for credit card transaction categorization...

I'll see if I can maybe make a repo by the next time there's a thread about how customer hostile banks are.

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#83

Post by cactus2093 » Wed, May 12, 2021, 11:51 AM UTC

stuaxo wrote: post #74

seanhunter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles my mind how far behind the payments curve the US is. If you go to India or Indonesia you can pay guy cooking street food at the side of the road by scanning a QR code but in New York you still have people paying for sandwiches in Pret a Manger using a cheque.

Unbelievable, I can't remember why last saw a cheque in the UK.

Don’t believe everything you read online, especially when the parent commenter is clearly not even American based on their spelling. I live in the US and have only used a “check” a couple of times in the past 5 years.

And almost nobody would ever use one at a retail store or restaurant or food truck, if anything they’re only used for sending large sums of money to small businesses who want to avoid the 3% card processing fee. It’s still bad that this fee is so high on our primary payment rails, but it’s not as ridiculous as people in this thread are making it sound.

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#84

Post by cactus2093 » Wed, May 12, 2021, 12:06 PM UTC

hahaxdxd123 wrote: post #9

The fact that Plaid even exists, and that their core business will probably continue to thrive for another decade makes me almost certain that the US will lose its stranglehold on innovation soon. In the US, I have to pass through so many rent seekers to move some digits over (Plaid, Stripe, and Visa/MasterCard). Meanwhile Europe has PSD2 now and China AliPay/WeChat Pay. Even India, which in the past 3 months has unf…

Payments in the US are more of a minor nuisance than a serious problem. And the rise of companies like stripe, Shopify, plaid, and PayPal before them seem to be doing a fine job filling the gaps. I’m sure eventually we’ll get better low level payment rails, but I don’t think it would actually affect the day to day life of the average American much if at all which is why it hasn’t happened yet.

If anything is going to kill the US it will be something like the collapse of fair elections or the huge ballooning healthcare and education costs, not the payment rails.

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#85

Post by psanford » Wed, May 12, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

tehwebguy wrote: post #12

On the consumer side I can’t imagine ever giving my bank credentials to Plaid or any other company. Super unnerving that this is even a thing, it’s like the number one rule of passwords.

> I can’t imagine ever giving my bank credentials to Plaid or any other company It's another tax on the poor, same as advertising. No service targeting sophisticated, wealthy people would use this. But if you have someone desperate for liquidity, of course they'll hand you the keys to their kingdom.

Plaid is used a lot of places, including services mostly for the wealthy. For example, a previous startup I worked at used Carta to manage employee stock options.

The default mechanism to transfer cash into Carta to exercise your options was with Plaid.

Now to be fair, you also had the option to use check routing numbers to perform the transfer. But I have to imagine that most people use plaid without a second thought.

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#86

Post by ncallaway » Wed, May 12, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

rendaw wrote: post #64

ncallaway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I really wanted to use mint, but couldn't bring myself to give away my bank password. I resorted to writing my own tooling using puppeteer running on my machine to automatically login to my bank accounts and download the CSV exports of my transaction data for each bank. I then normalize that transaction data, and import the data into Lunch Money. It was a pretty big hassle to write and get working reliably(i…

I've been doing this for a couple years, just with Selenium rather than Puppeteer. Banks are generally okay, and they don't change their websites that often which is nice. A couple banks force phone 2FA and deliberately hide the "email confirmation" option which makes full automation difficult. Also nag screens, Selenium unreliability, etc. Some companies like Azure use a different account name every time they bill m…

Yep, I haven't been able to get to full automation either.

I integrate with 1pw, so I don't have to enter my credentials which is nice.

I handle all the 2FA through cli prompts, so as a user you basically need to stick around as it's running because you might get a 2FA prompt as it logs in to banks.

The worst for me has been irregular marketing or other reminder popups from some banks. The kind of thing where they put some interstitial page up once per month or so after you sign in and want you to respond in some way.

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#87

Post by smnrchrds » Wed, May 12, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

FractalParadigm wrote: post #13

hahaxdxd123 wrote: post #9

The fact that Plaid even exists, and that their core business will probably continue to thrive for another decade makes me almost certain that the US will lose its stranglehold on innovation soon. In the US, I have to pass through so many rent seekers to move some digits over (Plaid, Stripe, and Visa/MasterCard). Meanwhile Europe has PSD2 now and China AliPay/WeChat Pay. Even India, which in the past 3 months has unf…

Hell even here in Canada we have the Interac system, which from what little I know of the US banking system, is consistently 10+ years ahead of the game. I've had "Chip & PIN" on my cards since at least 2008, and distinctly remember getting my first "tap" card in ~2011 or so. I genuinely couldn't tell you the last time I inserted my card into a machine because anything under $100 (>99% of my in-store purchases) can b…

Walmart added tap during the pandemic, as people did not want to touch the console to enter their pin. It's a welcome change.

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#88

Post by afavour » Wed, May 12, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

stuaxo wrote: post #74

seanhunter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles my mind how far behind the payments curve the US is. If you go to India or Indonesia you can pay guy cooking street food at the side of the road by scanning a QR code but in New York you still have people paying for sandwiches in Pret a Manger using a cheque.

Unbelievable, I can't remember why last saw a cheque in the UK.

It is literally not believable. I live in New York and have absolutely never seen anyone pay for sandwiches by check. Maybe, maybe if they were paying for a catering order of 50 sandwiches. But even then they'd probably be using a corporate credit card.

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#89

Post by ncallaway » Wed, May 12, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

climb_stealth wrote: post #75

ncallaway wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't released it. I've considered it, and it's written in a way that others could use it, but I know if it gained significant popularity it would be a really high value target to compromise. I don't have the time to dedicate to the vigilance necessary to defend that kind of a target. If you're interested, I'd be happy to share the source with you as a starting point

Sure, if you don't mind that would be great! My email is my hn username @noodfive.com Thanks!

I need to jump through a few hoops to send it, since Github won't let me add a user with read access to a private repository, but I'll send that over tonight

Re: Plaid paid people $500 for their employer payroll logins

#90

Post by vidarh » Wed, May 12, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

stuaxo wrote: post #74

seanhunter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boggles my mind how far behind the payments curve the US is. If you go to India or Indonesia you can pay guy cooking street food at the side of the road by scanning a QR code but in New York you still have people paying for sandwiches in Pret a Manger using a cheque.

Unbelievable, I can't remember why last saw a cheque in the UK.

I got my first ever checkbook when I moved to the UK in 2000 and marveled at how quaint and old fashioned it seemed - in Norway my parents had them in the 1980s, but they'd been phased out by the time I got my first adult bank account in the 90s.

I still have a UK checkbook, but haven't written a cheque in a decade.