Plaid in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Plaid in Canada

blog.plaid.com

126 pointspaisawalla57 comments

I'm probably in the minority here but I was really expecting this to be about Canada's relationship with the good old lumberjack shirt.

Haha, we've long joked that Plaid should launch a line of flannel shirts...

Me too! I was like “what’s the origin behind the caricature?”

Immediately after checking the link I was “ohhhh” and a little surprised that I was surprised.

Or possibly a Canadian spin off of supernatural where the boys say "sorry in that cute canadian way" when they kill monsters.

This is also what I was expecting

That's exactly what the person who wrote the title was hoping for.

This is FANTASTIC news, and as a Canadian interested in FinTech, I'm very excited to be able to use Plaid here. I can only imagine that getting the "big five" banks here to get on board with this would have amounted to a herculean task, so congrats to William and the Plaid team for making this happen.

It makes me ache just thinking of corralling a herd of banks to work with Plaid. Really is an understatement to say how difficult that must have been.

I work for one of the banks listed as supported by Plaid. I am intensely skeptical about the claims they say their API can provide, knowing how our systems work internally.

Real-time transactions, for one, are not really real-time. There are many things that get in the way of making these real-time and the issues go all the way to the terminal where you swipe your card. Identity is also sketchy. Many people still share bank accounts. It is an unwritten rule that an account !== a person.

I'd be curious to know how they pull this information. There are some APIs available, but we are careful to hand out access. If they're screen scraping, then, well... god help them.

Most applications won't need "real-time" data, so I think things like end-of-day balances and transaction history are enough to cover 90% of the developer use-cases. As far as Identity goes, if you're willing to fork out $500/mo + fees for the production tier, you should be able to afford credit data from Transunion or someone else, which is going to be far more reliable than pulling ID info from bank accounts (for the reasons you stated).

I definitely share your concern about how the data gets pulled by Plaid, but as far as I can tell most major banks that have mobile applications have demonstrated that they are at least _marginally_ capable of developing high-availability REST APIs that are reliable enough for purposes like this. I wouldn't be surprised if Plaid somehow managed to get them to agree to using the "mobile app" APIs for their application.

Does this mean apps like Mint and YNAB will be able to stop asking for users passwords and switch to something like OAuth with read-only privileges?

If they are willing to pay for Plaid's API, I don't see why not!

From my understanding YNAB at least is already using Plaid - every service I've used that uses Plaid still needs username/password for the financial institution.

Speaking of Mint, has anyone else found it super buggy and unreliable? All of my accounts seem to have incorrect numbers more often than not.

It's been very accurate for me and I have about 10 accounts connected with 6-7 institutions.

And you're Canadian?

Ah sorry. No, I am in US.

I'm Canadian, and I have found it to be fairly reliable with several accounts from different parties. It gets mixed up when I buy something with PayPal in USD, it says I have paid both the US amount, and the Canadian equivalent. And it's categories aren't the smartest, but aside from that, everything works as expected.

You're still providing your cleartext credentials to Plaid, their product is coalescing this work behind a nice API.

Last I checked, neither Plaid nor the banks provide an OAuth login option. You're still giving away your bank credentials to the 3rd party app.

Canada is lacking in fintech apps for consumers. I'm excited to see more companies expand north. There might not be many of us but we can be loud and proud users (with really polite app reviews! ha)

Frankly, I'm super skeptical. Maybe I just don't get it, but it would seem to me that what Plaid is claiming to do is somewhat magical.

It just seems to me, likely another poster pointed out, is that they would have to partner with every single bank they want to deal with in order to send the right credentialing steps in order to access their internal systems, provided those systems even exist, OR, they would need to have access to a mythical overarching API that inherits to all systems (which doesn't exist). So somewhere in their platform there is a `Step 2) A miracle occurs`, and I just have a hard time believing that they can just gloss over noticing that before giving at least a motivation for the miracle. I mean if my money were at stake and I wanted to pay for the service (and my business' money would be at stake too!) I'd want at least a little bit of a guarantee that the service works as advertised and is totally above board.

Can I use this as an individual to get my transaction history?

I don't see why you couldn't use testing tier for individual transaction history.

https://plaid.com/pricing/

Unless I'm mistaken, the Testing tier only allows the use of "sandbox" banking credentials, whereas the Development tier actually lets you connect to real bank accounts. In either case, it's free to get your own transaction history.

Plaid user here. The sandbox has only one valid account with more or less randomly generated transactions. You want the development environment.

It also has " First 100 live credentials in Development free".

Charley from Plaid here.

Correct! We have three environments you can send API traffic into - sandbox, development, and production.

Sandbox + development are 100% free to use, development just requires a quick request through the dashboard after signing up for API keys. (https://dashboard.plaid.com/signup)

Sandbox- gives access to sandbox data to test the integration. Development - add up to 100 live bank accounts Production - add as many live accounts with paid account

Awesome! (Where were you guys 5 years ago when I was doing my PFM ;).

I went looking for a Go library for your API and the plaid one says it's not maintained/supported anymore. Is there a replacement (third party or not) for it?

Plaid was just starting 5 years ago :)

we currently don't have an updated official go library for our API, but shoot me an email (charley@plaid.com) and can shoot over some recs for third party libraries

Yes, but you do have to go through the signup process and have your API access granted.

Plaid founder here. Yes - our development environment is unpaid and many people use it for personal budgeting. You can sign up here: https://dashboard.plaid.com/signup

This is fantastic, thank you!!

Last time I looked at services like Mint, etc...

You have to give out your main login credentials used to access your bank.

If anything happens to these downstream processors, the bank provides no support as you gave away your main login credentials.

My "Big 5" Canadian Bank won't provide read-only login credentials so using these type of services is a complete no-go from my end.

It's really great news and am looking forward to seeing what fintech applications I can build to disrupt the industry.

Build an app that allows me to get notifications when debit transactions are made. Even if it's minutes or hours late.

I LOVE that I get an email every time my credit card is used. But my debit doesn't have that option.

What does the email contain? Are you mainly using it for tracking personal spending or just making sure you're aware when fraud happens?

FWIW, I'm thinking more into personal spending atm.

Both. I'll sometimes get a bill payment and immediate notice, "oh hey that's higher than usual. I ought to see why"

Also when I travel, it saves my butt all the time. Its how I detected a hotel totally screwing up the accomodation bill. Also gives me insight into exchange rate so I don't fool myself on prices.

Email contains vendor name, date, and price in Canadian dollars.

As part of testing out the API, I’d be happy to try it out and see how well it works although if all the other bank apps have it, then it kinda defeats the purpose.

Yeah. Makes sense. Too bad. :)

Simple Bank does this (simple.com). The notifications are immediate.

It will even give you a notification when your card is run at a restaurant that includes a suggested tip - generally before the server comes back with the check to sign.

Simple is not available in Canada, which is what the above poster is referring to. Few (no?) Canadian banks offer email notifications for debit (Interac) transactions.

The TD MySpend app does this.

The top 3 banks all have this functionality in their main mobile app.

RBC allows you get notified when a "large" transaction occurs.

You can just set the threshold to $1 though.

Any planned support for Desjardins?

does plaid store you credentials? or how does it authenticate to the bank?

you provide your bank credentials to the 3rd party app, which forwards them to Plaid

Will I be able to use Plaid to capture assets/investments as well?

Plaid can pull balance information for asset + investments accounts, so typically the size of the portfolio

Still no SVB support for Plaid, which most tech companies use :-(

Yes, this really bugs me too. Unfortunately, the issue is on SVB's side. We're continuing to work on it, but I'd also recommend raising this with SVB directly if you are a customer.

Whats svb?

Silicon Valley Bank -- business accounts are used by a ton of startups in the bay area.

Does this work with the Stripe integration?

I was hoping it was the band.

No HSBC support :(

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