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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

What the fuck? There is no way, never, ever, that I would even consider doing that. How the hell is it a good idea for any company to try to convince people that it should be normal to share login credentials with a third party for any service, much less something as sensitive as one's bank account? That's just training people to get scammed.

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> That's just training people to get scammed.

Yes. All the work of "don't enter your bank password on any website that isn't your bank" went down the bloody trash once this awful workaround to the awfulness that is ACH happened. It's very sad.

I don't disagree, but this takes seconds instead of 2-3 business days in the case of ACH verification. 2-3 business days is an absolute eternity in the world of Bitcoin speculation.

You can do what Gemini does -- credit the account with fake money once the user requests ACH transfer, let them make trades with it, and only let them withdraw any proceeds of it (whether bitcoin or fiat) once the ACH transaction fully settles.

That's a really interesting approach... do they front the money to the user while the deposit is settling?

boy, somebody ought to work on a replacement for that awful ACH system

UK has Faster Payments; which runs 24/7 and has times measured in seconds, unlike ACH (doesn't run on weekends, takes days), and charges no costs to end-users. This is a well-solved problem, the issue is that USian banks make far too much off overdraft fees to want to upgrade their infrastructure at the cost of making less money from parasitic fees.

Hasn't Mint been doing this for ages?

Was about to say this. Pretty much most of services that tie in with a bank account that I've ever used provide this option as an alternative to waiting 3 days for bank account verification. It is truly bizarre how this has become the standard.

Yes, but Mint used a similar approach.

Not sure if this is what they use now, but Mint used a similar (but older) service to Plaid called Yodlee [0] as their backend for accessing bank accounts.

[0] https://www.yodlee.com/

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/mint-is-yodlees-youtube/

I entered one account on Mint and found myself with OP, and decided I didn't want to enter a bunch of different login credentials into a different app.

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