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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I think "direct integrations" as a euphemism from "using reverse-engineered private APIs in violation of their terms" is dishonest.

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That's a fair point - we've been trying to determine the best way to compress "using reverse-engineered private APIs in violation of their terms, but in practice brokerages don't really take enforcement actions against this," and "direct integrations" is what we came up with. We'll work on finding a better way to express this and are open to suggestions.

I think "unofficial API" is probably the most succinct phrase without being dishonest. A direct integration does imply some kind of professional relationship with the other company.

This sounds good - thank you for the feedback.

It's not as long as they expressly state there is no relationship or endorsement with the brokerages where there isn't one.

Perhaps. The current site and documentation appears to lack anything of the sort.

It’s a brand new company. Give them a chance to work these things out.

Well, they're taking shots at players like Plaid (who use majority direct oAuth integrations) while doing the exact same kind of skirting around companies that don't play nice and share permissioned user data.

Aggregators aren't scraping because they enjoy using headless browsers, the US doesn't let end users own their data and this is the industry workaround. I don't expect new players to change the system so much as I expect them to accurately represents it to those outside of fintech

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