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Yes. That's how Mint, Digit, and all the other "connect your bank account" apps tend to do it. I've yet to find a major US bank that has anything resembling an OAuth style flow - the closest I've seen is Wells Fargo offering generation of read-only credentials.

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Then how is Plaid more secure than Mint, Digit etc?

From this [1], they are a provider for these.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939425

So, they're just punting the liability to another 3rd party (Plaid)? Given all the excitement in this thread, I was hoping that Plaid had miraculously cajoled the banks into an OAuth integration.

But I guess banks will be banks :-/

I'm sure something of the sort is in the works; it's hard to build momentum with a ton of huge legacy systems to bring along.

Banks don't make this easy. There isn't a secure way of doing it in the vast majority of cases. Companies like Digit use Plaid to offload the risk of storing these credentials (like how most startups offload PCI/credit-card to Stripe). Intuit's big enough to have their own solution for Mint.

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