Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland (opens in new tab)

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?

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.

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.

I've been really impressed by Plaid's service, but also the level of customer support they provide. I have been experiencing issues connecting CapitalOne accounts in the Plaid test environment. I let them know, and got a long, thought out response, and I'm not even a paying customer yet.

Congrats Plaid!

Having previously used Yodlee, I'm now migrating onto Plaid in the UK.

Speaking from a documentation and API point of view, you can more or less think of Yodlee as PayPal and Plaid as Stripe.

Yodlee still covers WAY more banks than Plaid in the world, so we still need to use them for some countries.

For those who have used Plaid for personal projects, can someone confirm if you can pull basic monthly stats by account for all account types, including cash, debt (CC/mortgage), and assets (investment accounts, etc.), and then net worth and net income, all while on the free or pay as you go plans?

It appears from the docs that I'd need to pay $500/mo for very basic stats for anything not cash account balance related which is not feasible for my personal use.

My current alternative is Mint which is really lacking in the "automating my own spreadsheet with the data" department.

Can someone pls ELI5 how Plaid, Yodlee, AuthLayer are valid businesses and not hit with regulatory hurdles? They seem to be scraping bank websites behind the scenes. Whilst I have no idea abt the US/EU market, I know for a fact that most banks do charge exorbitant fees to access accounts over APIs (esp if you're a BigCo and need that kind of control). Surely, the banks can't be happy abt that? Surprising they haven't lobbied yet against this or aren't stampeding all over Plaid et al with lawsuits?

The Spanish translation is awkward. Not the level of Google Translate, but still not looking native. This will make many people not trust it with their bank credentials IMHO.

"Esta aplicación usa Plaid para conectar su banco"

This is missing a connector like:

"Esta aplicación usa Plaid para conectar a su banco"

Or change the whole sentence:

"Plaid se conecta a su banco con esta aplicación"

"Plaid se quiere a vincular a su banco" (if "Plaid" and "this application" are the same)

And of course, everything still sounds way too formal and old-school. Looking at the English site, it's clear it wants to transmit a young startup vibe. But the Spanish version sounds like an old boring bank app more than a young useful one. Either it's been translated by non-natives, or translated very individual sentences without context, or by someone in Latin-America (the Spanish over South America in general is a lot more formal sounding for Spaniards).

Wow, congratulations to the team! Amazing to break through regulatory barriers and make new things possible.

Developers should refuse to use Plaid. Plaid abuses its account privileges and takes much more than it gives the users. For instance, Carta should never need Plaid to pull every transaction from a bank account just to let someone exercise stock options.

Hmm. I thought this was about the electronic music duo Andy Turner and Ed Handley [1] on Warp Records [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaid_(band)

[2]: https://bleep.com/music/artist/27-plaid

https://m.soundcloud.com/bleep_bot/bleep-warp-records-plaid-...

I am kind of suspicious of Plaid stage managing their coverage on HN. I've had a Plaid employee recommend Plaid to me on a comment on a different finance related thread. If it was recommending a tool or utility it would have been fine,but recommending a paid service of your employer looks very close to commercial solicitation.

Can anyone use Plaid and then start connecting to banks? I think the product makes complete sense but it's always a little worrisome that it's seemingly easy for anyone to launch an app that connects to your bank account. From what I know in the US you're not covered by the FDIC by connecting through the API.

And what is that? From the front page, "Plaid is the easiest way for users to connect their bank accounts to an app." Why would I want to do that? This smells like an attempt of bringing the concept of a credit score to Europe, is that what it is?

Does anyone know if European SEPA actually overlap with Plaid here ? Was SEPA supposed to "commoditize" the whole "grant access to my bank account to 3rdparty" ?

Does anyone have the list of banks supported? On their website they only link to their WS to fetch them instead of a simple list

I read that as "Paid lunches"

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!