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Comment by ianstormtaylor | Hacker News Reader

If Stripe can leverage their banking relationships to leapfrog Plaid by integrating directly with bank's APIs instead of doing screen scraping... that would be massive! It seems like Plaid's biggest weakness is the flakiness of their connections, which creates so much frustration/churn downstream.

Plaid's other weakness is their opaque, enterprise-style pricing, which is seems like Stripe is doing away with. Hopefully they can bring the price down, because lots of consumer-facing use cases aren't viable due to the high monthly price per connection.

I hope they add support for investment account holdings—it seems like Plaid is the only one that does this well.

—

Edit: digging deeper, it looks like Stripe proxies to Plaid-like "service providers" under the covers—at least for institutions without OAuth flows. [1][2][3] Presumably they'll build in-house connections over time, but it dents my hope that their connectivity will be better than Plaid's. Either way, transparent pricing and more competition in the space is still welcome!

[1]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-is-the-relationshi...

[2]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-does-stripe-limit-d...

[3]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/who-will-obtain-my-fina...

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Plaid founder here. Stripe does not integrate with any bank API's directly (AFAICT). They wrap two aggregators, MX and Finicity to build this product. (Also, not sure what MX products they are using, but MX itself is an aggregator of aggregators, including others such as Yodlee.)

On pricing, Stripe's listed rates are 30-200% higher than Plaid rates (perhaps due to high vendor costs). That said, if anyone does have feedback on where Plaid pricing is prohibiting new use cases, we'd love to hear! I'm zach at plaid if folks would like to discuss.

Edwin from Stripe here. Stripe does integrate directly with banks. In our beta period, most volume we’ve seen has been over bank APIs. Some banks do not have APIs—we use financial partners to connect with them, and we’re talking with many banks in hopes that they will enable direct API access soon.

Our pricing is upfront: https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing. We’ve worked with a large beta group of users to make sure the pricing is in line with what they see in the market.

Gotta love this spicy thread

Especially the

> Our pricing is upfront

Because plaid does everything not to be transparent on their pricing.

ditto

Ha I was thinking the same

The pricing looks higher than Plaid. $1.50 is way more than the $0.30 per linked bank Plaid charges.

However if your customer/sales support is superior you could win just on that. Plaids is terrible. Support tickets go weeks without responses, I need to speak to a sales guy just to enable UK/Canadian connections and still haven’t heard back after weeks of chasing. Other tickets can get left for similar amount of time too.

Plaid should get out of the way and make it fully self service to enable countries/features when you’re getting started, or fix their support/sales team so users aren’t waiting weeks to hear back from them just to enable a couple of countries they already support or confirm pricing.

With regards to pricing they also make it difficult as they don’t really explain the pricing well when you enable production either. They talk about “accounts” when their API talks about “items”. After enabling production my first bill confirmed (as no sales person ever responded to me on my question) that account was item, and not accounts the institution holds which would be extremely expensive! They don’t provide any examples on how the pricing works either, so you kind of have to figure it out after you enable production. AWS docs give a pricing example to help users understand how it works. Plaid should do the same or (again) improve their sales/support to answer questions on it promptly and not leave users hanging for weeks.

Anyway glad to see some competition here, if Stripe can match the $0.30 pricing, add UK/Canada and provide faster/better support they can win this market if Plaid doesn’t sort out support/sales quickly.

Which banks have OAuth APIs? I would love to switch to one of those instead of exposing my password due to my bank's incompetence.

WellsFargo has some form of OAuth (https://developer.wellsfargo.com/). I know that YNAB (https://www.youneedabudget.com/) uses it.

I use Bunq here in the NL. I wish all banks would steal their APIs. The abilities I have as a dev are simply amazing.

https://doc.bunq.com/

Bunq seems like a… suboptimal bank, though. They cost ~5x more than other NL banks, and by all accounts, their customer support is streets behind.

Their API and app-centric approach seem to be the only upshots, and even then, other banks have relatively good apps these days.

I am a very happy Bunq customer for 4+ years, and as a user of other Dutch banks (for a mortgage - ABN amro, in the past UK banks like FD), their overall service levels great - if I chat via the app I have always been helped quickly, flexibility with accounts, cards, automation via the APIs etc is absolutely worth the price hike. These are things I am happy to pay a few extra cups of coffee a month for as they make my life with an extended family much easier to manage day to day.

Good service levels will be a real USP, I expect. In the Netherlands where physical banks are a dying breed (especially those that deal with money. Aforementioned ABN Amro doesn't let you change a 100 Euro bill into 2 fifty bills, for instance). Especially the elderly are lost in the digital world and need guidance. For my parents for instance, every website is like a completely different app they need to learn how to use and with layouts changing all the time this is an enormous struggle to them.

I hate the fact that physical banks (and cash) are disappearing. I don't have complicated needs as to the digital services I consume, same as many other people. Then online banks become indistinguishable from the next, and it is ability to contact real people that sets them apart.

The cost-cutting wrt physical bank branches is just ridiculous. You can't even deposit or withdraw coinage at ABN AMRO branches anymore; they outsourced that to home improvement stores instead (yes, really).

Yes, I experienced that too. Acted surprised and look at me exasperated and what seemed with slight disgust when I came with actual cash to their office. "We don't deal with money, sir".

The situation with cash is overall very bad. Try to pay with a 100 Euro note in smaller cities. Almost no one will accept it, including banks. I regularly see very frustated tourists who with cash in hand are left out in the cold.

Capital One does, but for some reason the connection process breaks if I have an ad blocker enabled even if I whitelist their domain.

Chase does at least for credit cards.

Betterment has app passwords, which is better than using your full password.

Really happy Betterment implemented this. Hoping they’ll soon have some actions based Auth as well.

Unfortunately I did something wrong with a Betterment connection last week that caused them to lock my account for hacking attempts, until I call them, and their EST support hours are only in times I'm in meetings in PST so far…

but at least I don't use their checking feature, which they're oddly excited about despite it having no advantage over other banks and no possible way it ever could have an advantage.

I got blocked as fraudulent and banned before I could even transfer my savings in to Betterment. (No problems with Wealthfront, and now a happyish customer).

Different aggregators will have different connections established based on relationships and also the priority of the bank. I've seen a ton of different options based on the fintechs apps I use from Plaid, MX, Finicity, etc. Long story short, it's usually the big banks. Different aggregators have different priorities around the amount of traffic they send over these connections though. Candidly I don't know why that is, but I have some hypotheses. Ultimately though you can assume all of the above names will have accounts like Chase, Wells, Citi, Cap One, BOA, US Bank etc.

MX and Finicity both have OAuths to like 80+% of the top 20 financial institutions. There's a reason Plaid doesn't want people switching to them and it's hella sus

I believe Plaid was the one who got JPMorgan to build an OAuth API in the first place: https://finovate.com/plaid-signs-open-banking-agreement-with...

Why can’t the reason be “losing their only source of revenue to a competitor”? That seems like a fine reason to not want people to switch

Edit: cannot assure, but rumor on the street from peers, they were not the ones to get Chase to build OAuth.

PR is a hell of a marketing tactic.

Plaid used oauth for Bank of America circa 2019 when I tried, and currently uses Capital One's oauth when I try to log into it. I'm sure they use it when it's convenience (or maybe when the financial institution mandates it).

I know that Charles Schwab has some sort of OAuth flow which I used when connecting my account to TurboTax this year.

So, I got very excited about this, but it seems that banks are expecting "bank integrator" aka companies, and not giving access to end users :( If any knows of a bank that has API access in the US do share!

You might find luck using companies targeting algo trading. A lot of companies allow use of the account more like a checking account (eg interactive brokers). They have an API and also allow different logins to have different authorizations.

Mercury Bank has nice, friendly APIs. I believe they only do business bank accounts, though.

But I think I remember seeing that some of Capital One's bank account offerings have some customer facing apis.

chase has an OAuth flow but not every integration uses it.

Capital One

they deserve a lot of credit for how early they built this and made it relatively broadly available!

Your documentation says you use service providers, specifically MX and Finicity. Is that correct or are you integrating directly (or some mixture)?

There are ~10k depository institutions in the US. Maybe 20 of the largest offer OAuth connections (look at the list of FDX members for a good proxy).

Plaid, Finicity, and Yodlee all purport to support both those direct connections with big banks and the long tail of smaller banks and credit unions. It reads like Stripe has built some direct connections (where possible) and is wrapping other providers for everyone else. That is also, as I understand it, what MX does.

https://financialdataexchange.org/FDX/The-Consortium/Members...

He's saying it's a mixture.

I'm confused here. So from my understanding, Stripe plugs into the APIs of banks who already have them (like every other aggregator), then relies on existing aggregators for the 95% of banks who don't. In addition, your pricing is "in line" with "the market".

My question then, is: what is the upside here, then? As a hypothetical fintech developer, why do I choose Stripe for my use case over the established competition? Why would I want my end-user's credentials in transit between multiple companies, for the same price as the rest of the market, with no improvement in performance or uptime?

Shots fired, good on Stripe for immediately clapping back to set the record straight…

@zach this is what I find very frustrating about the current players. We recently got pricing from you and obviously being under NDA won’t share the figures but I’m not seeing the discount you quote above compared to stripe.

Further there are significant platform minimums and platform fees that add large costs initially.

How do you reconcile the above comments from our interaction?

It sounds like the issue noted above is less the actual pricing, and more that it's difficult to find out what the pricing is.

This matches up with my personal experience - I had to get in touch with an actual human and ask them for the pricing just to see if a project would be viable. I did get a relatively fast response that made the pricing very clear, but because it didn't come with any caveats (e.g. volume-based pricing or "we need to negotiate pricing on a per-client basis") it almost made the experience more frustrating.

Basically if your pricing is simple and universal enough that you could post it directly to the pricing page, you should post it to the pricing page. Especially for developer-focused products, hiding the pricing can lead to a serious reduction in conversion.

My use case is transaction data so the pricing for Stripe's competing product isn't posted yet, but if I was choosing between the two products and only one had pricing clearly posted on the website I'd immediately go with that one unless the pricing was so ridiculous that it wasn't affordable. And if the pricing was ridiculous, I'd probably assume that Plaid's pricing was just as bad.

Basically, I should be able to evaluate your product and its pricing without engaging with any of your employees wherever possible. I routinely remove companies from consideration because I can't plug them into a spreadsheet of prices without going back and forth with a sales team whose time I'll just be wasting anyway.

Plaid doesn't have publicly listed pricing at all. Might as well be infinite.

If a startup can use Stripe, who they're already integrating with, or integrate with a new provider with hidden pricing that requires them to contact a sales person, I wonder who they're going to choose. Good luck.

> That said, if anyone does have feedback on where Plaid pricing is prohibiting new use cases,

I remember in a previous company we migrated out of Plaid into SynapseFI because Plaid started charging a high price on a per connection request service (like, requesting a new bank connection for a new customer was quite expensive).

It seemed Plaid was focusing on the Mint like use cases: low number of users, allowing them to setup a Plaid connection one time to be used extensively subsequently. While our use case was more akin to: lots of users/authentications doing one time connections that may not be reused. (kind of what might be used for credit risk analysis, although the company was not doing that).

> MX itself is an aggregator of aggregators

Aggregators all the way down...

The US really needs its own PSD2.

Unlike Plaid, Finicity and Yodlee have direct integrations with some banks. Example: Silicon Valley Bank has direct integration with Finicity. SVB through Plaid breaks quickly (because they require some weird 2fa policy).

Let me know if I'm missing something but if Stripe is A) providing reliable connection to common banks Plaid misses and B) saving it's users from all the headaches of integrating with old school services like Finicity/Yodlee, then charging a premium sounds like fair game.

Plaid has direct integrations with many banks too -- Silicon Valley Bank is actually a Plaid partner for ACH processing (see https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/silicon-valley-bank-an...). Not sure when your bad experience with 2fa was but Plaid's connection to SVB has improved over the past ~6 months as we've begun to work together more closely and should continue to do so. [I work at Plaid]

Hate to argue, but I agree that Plaid's connection to SVB is indeed unusuable. I've been trying to use them for over a year and we ended up dropping SVB just this month. Chase is on OAuth and WAY better if you need TXN data.

A partnership for ACH is more related to importing stable routing and account numbers, then enabling initiating ACH transfers. Scraping transaction data is a completely different integration that seems to have been forgotten.

Sadly, I'd even wager SVB-Plaid data won't improve any time soon. Remember that SVB doesn't even yet allow external bank transfers on their own bank portal.

How can anyone even calculate pricing when Plaid is the worst company when it comes to pricing transparency.

Thank god competition is heating up.

Thanks for the reply! I came to that same conclusion about their use of "service providers" after reading through their support docs (and added an edit above), definitely a bummer.

We all wish more banks had API's! Our team is actively working with many more banks to launch them soon, but alas -- legacy infrastructure is slow to move!

As a developer I love the idea of plaid, but the pricing is scary. The 100 first banks is great, but the pay as you go does not give me any ideas of the pricing.

I love how Stripe presented the pricing page, 1.5$ per account, 10cents per fetch balance. Very clear. I still have no idea how much plaid will cost me.

I'm very familiar with both Finicity and MX. I know that MX isn't an aggregator of aggregators. Stop lying bro. Tell people about how you abuse credentials and take some responsibility rather than trying to constantly pass the buck and blame others.

Hey - can you please make your substantive points without personal attacks or swipes? We ban accounts that do those things—especially new accounts showing up to fight shit out like this. Not cool, no matter how right you are or feel you are.

Also, it's not in your interest to post like this to HN anyhow. The audience will only side against you if you fulminate and call names. If you want to win readers over, you should drop all that and instead provide specific, concrete information and say what's important about it.

(Before anyone misinterprets the above: I have no idea which side you're on. I haven't looked at any of the comments you've replied to. All I know is that, whichever side you're arguing for, you're going about it in the wrong way for HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix that, we'd appreciate it.)

You seem pretty clueless about your competitors and you are talking poorly, very openly about them here Zach. That is not a good look in any way and reflective of a poor corporate culture.

If MX and Finicity are aggregators of aggregators, that would still mean Plaid would benefit, right? Maybe you (and your sales team) do not know your competition.

Publicly airing grievances as well against Stripe, who you could potentially partner with in the future, reflects an underlying toxic corporate culture at Plaid. I do not think Stripe will likely ever want to do business with you after this and prevent others from doing the same. I have never worked at Plaid, but I am not inclined to want to work with you based on what we are seeing here. Plaidsettlment.com

Zach has responded to a Stripe product manager on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/zachperret/status/1521898404061716480

I think Zach knows his product very well & this could be espionage on Stripe's part, but I'm not dissatisfied with Stripe's product nonetheless.

Disclaimer: I've never used Plaid.

Plaid and their lawyers should have hashed it out with Stripe then in RFP. I work for a big bank. If we send out RFP's for a project there's language in there that most providers never look at. It basically says "I can do whatever I want with information in the RFP except give it to your company's competitors."

So if I am working for a top 10 bank, and I see value in a solution, if I cannot get it cheaper than it would cost me to develop it and time is not that big of a factor, I build it myself. If there are no time constraints and vendor can deliver solution at roughly the same cost I can build it for, I built it myself.

My guess as not being part of the stripe/plaid conversations or RFP. Zach's lawyers did not redline or challenge language around processes or IP with Stripe in RFP Agreements and that was likely the biggest downfall.

Plaid does have great litigation attorney's, I mean their class action settlement was only $58 million. So likely, Plaid might get something if there is IP that was protected. It will come out in discovery if a lawsuit gets legs.

Creating a throwaway for this (potentially valid) criticism destroys any credibility you may have.

fair criticism. My points remain. Having talked to Plaid's sales team, not bad people. I just don't trust providers that openly talk poorly of competitors and plaids sales team did that and the CEO of the company is doing it in public.

I have no dog in this fight--I did not interpret that to be talking poorly about stripe.

It read like conjecture at best, and inaccurate information at worst.

You haven't read many Stripe stories, huh

There aren't that many. Bolt does not count.

Pretty sure Plaid already has integrated directly with bank's APIs and has been moving away from screen scraping for years.

Plaid's flakiness / reliance on screen scraping is probably that a lot of these banks don't expose APIs / OAuth etc.

Indeed! Plaid is integrated with ~every bank that has an API, and in many cases we've actually helped the banks build API's themselves.

Do you know why Fidelity Investments plaid connection doesn’t work most of the time?

It’s something I hit often and have to do the old microdeposit thing (if I can even figure out how to trick the service into allowing me to do that at all).

Does fidelity just have some sort of broken setup?

Not sure when you were testing, but we do call out some instability on the Fidelity Institution Status page in the Developer Dashboard.

> To maintain system stability, Fidelity currently limits access during high-volume windows. As a result, please expect unavailability between 9-10:30am and 3-4:30pm ET. We recommend end users link Fidelity accounts between 5pm - 9am ET.

This is a huge annoyance with integrations for me.

The host knows when they break. Or if they don't, they should, via automated tests.

Tell me "It's down." Not some bullshit about experiencing temporary difficulties.

Great question. I do not know off the top of my head, but can look into it.

We're (https://realizefi.com/) currently rolling out our Fidelity integration which will allow you to link accounts at any time.

It's unlikely Stripe has access to any APIs that Plaid doesn't also have access to.

it's also unlikely Stripe doesn't have access to any APIs that Plaid has access to

sorry what? no one was saying Plaid had access to more APIs than Stripe

right, which makes it easy to clone the whole set of APIs

We've found that Plaid only leverages around 3-4 Direct API connections for some reason, why other aggregators like MX, Finicity, Yodlee all have 10+. It seems suspect to me because Plaid doesn't seem to be prioritizing the protection of user credentials the same way others are.

In this thread you've accused the founder of Plaid multiple times of lying, without evidence, and most importantly, your account was made only 1 hour ago.

You've said "Stop lying bro.", "hella sus", "This is 100% a lie", "seems suspect", all without evidence.

You seem to have some ulterior motive here that you haven't disclosed. Maybe you're right about everything, but it comes across poorly.

This is false. Hundreds of banks have built out api's on plaid exchange: https://plaid.com/plaid-exchange/

Yeah, at this point the majority of API requests that Plaid fulfills are filled with data provisioned from institutions via an API. I assume that OP was only looking at named banks who we did press releases with (e.g. Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One) but there are many more financial institutions we have API integrations with beyond that, either via Plaid Exchange or via their own APIs. [I work at Plaid]

It's not a good luck for Stripe to have one of its employees astroturfing the competition.

Plaid actually doesn't do investment account holdings well. My team tried using them for an app and ended up building our own API to address the problem https://realizefi.com/.

We provide real-time holdings, transactions, orders, historical performance (Plaid doesn't provide this at all), and balances.

Hey! Looks interesting. The two things that would hold me back from using it are (a) not enough institution support, for big places like Vanguard and Fidelity where many people have investments, and (b) no clear pricing structure listed that I could see, so I assume it’s going to be more expensive than Plaid.

Thanks! We're currently releasing Fidelity and will have IBKR & Vanguard released within the next 2 months.

Sorry for the lack of a pricing page - we're going to add that in. We have graduated pricing starting at $1/mo per linked account and decreasing at different levels of scale. That fee includes unlimited API calls. We're also offering discounted pricing to companies that integrate within the next 60 days.

Feel free to email me whenever at sean@realizefi.com

Added our pricing page to the website - https://www.realizefi.com/pricing.html

Our Fidelity integration will be out by the end of this week.

If they do this it would indeed be huge. Screen scraping and the like to get around a proper API sucks. In the EU we have PSD2 but the APIs aren’t all amazing.

The APIs aren't amazing, and you need to be a financial service provider to access production environment. Aka useless for any startup or person

Yeah getting a license with bafin is tough but a VC backed fintech can do it or partner or use the api of a fintech that already has a license and build off of that.

Also every 90 days you have to do some weird dance to keep the apps receiving your data, it never seems to work right and you forget. I would think building a business on such flakey APIs is dubious at best!

To fight that flakey situation of bad APIs, one decides to build a business based on flakey screen scraping instead? With financial information? What could possibly go wrong?

What's the alternative? 95% of banks in the US don't have a dedicated API. If there was no screen scraping whatsoever in the industry, then the fintech market would be much smaller. Any fintech company whose product is centered their users' financial information (and that's most of them) would see their potential customer base, and thus growth potential, sliced in half. On the consumer side of it, if you're Susan and you bank with Northeast Minnesota's Credit Union for Educators, then without screen scraping you are essentially cut off from being able to use the majority of fintech applications out there.

Screen scraping is a terrible compromise for sure, but without it, fintech, and the everyday consumer's ability to more effectively engage with their finances, would be severely neutered. One day, we'll have a rich financial ecosystem where financial institutions, fintechs, and consumers all talk with eachother exclusively through secure, reliable APIs, but until then, the only other alternative is to cripple this entire industry. Or have Congress pass a sweeping PSD2-esque bill, but good luck with that lol

I like the APIs but every 90 days is too many lost users I bet. I think it would be nice if the renewal worked like this -> 1st permissions -> 90 days, 2nd authorisation 180 days, 3rd 365 days and then every renewal after that is a year. Would reduce churn from this by probably 75%...

Even better it would be best if it just emailed you every 90 days asking if you wanted to remove/continue with permissions and did token rolling automatically without the user being involved.

Imagine if you had to renew your account for Facebook every 90 days, I think they would never have built a business.

>Imagine if you had to renew your account for Facebook every 90 days, I think they would never have built a business.

You're not winning any sympathy from me with this at all.

Ahah, but you understand the point ;-)

This is still a ton better than asking the client for credentials and then scraping their logged in bank accounts which is hella creepy.

Hasn't Yodlee been doing this way longer than Plaid? They are (or at least were) the backbone for mint.com

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