Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland(blog.plaid.com) |
Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland(blog.plaid.com) |
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.
You can read more about that here: https://imgz.org/
In addition, he has a page on his site with some really cool personal projects: https://www.stavros.io/projects/
It's a marginal amount of work to link against a few big banks that have solid APIs, but once you get to the BECUs and the SESLOCs of the world, this gets much more difficult. Imagine doing this globally, and I think it's an even taller task.
The EU has been working on PSD2, which might make this less valuable, but there's still a long run way (IMO) where Plaid can quickly become the default choice for anyone who wants to link against banking APIs.
Beyond that, the network effect means that Plaid will likely eventually get to broker individual relationships with banks and be able to move into dictating more of the market in the long run, putting them in a position of strength.
I haven't worked with Open Banking, how is it? In the US, for bank transfers, NACHA files are fairly easy to work with, as long as you can access and verify bank account numbers (ideally get balance and identity information too). I think all the APIs support this, eg: https://developer.wellsfargo.com/apis/payments/account-valid...
It's hard to tell how quickly things will change and improve. Banks should have an incentive to work on this, since it will give them more control of their data and logins, potentially lowering liabilities and hack potential.
Congrats Plaid!
It’s like, free beta test report so you don’t piss off your real customers. Maybe not something to just trash.
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.
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.
"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).
[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-...
Having said that, for plaid in the UK, they do offer both an open banking integration and a scraping integration for most banks.
I'm sure you know well the reasons for this. It is not practical to move large amounts of money via credit card due to the fees involved.
As for your point on transaction history, you could always create a separate account specifically for these type of situations where you're passing your login. Even if they get your transaction history, it would be very limited.
