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Comment by justaguyhere | Hacker News Reader

Services like Plaid and Mint can only read data, isn't it? Has that changed?

I mean, not if you give them your username and password

A relatively simple fix for this would be for banks to allow me to create a read-only user ID and a transactional user ID...I could hand the read-only credentials to services like Plaid. I suggested this to Fidelity over a year ago and they looked at me like I was crazy.

Banking in the US is so horrible at the moment. there’s an immense opportunity for someone to come through and give a better consumer experience, but I fear the barriers to entry are far too high. I had high hopes for Simple.com, but they ended up destroying about every useful feature they had and falling way short of the mark...

Simpler (for users) would be using OAuth 2.0 and APIs with proper permissions. Users shouldn't need two sets of credentials.

Yes, I've wanted this for years. I still use Mint but I hate the password part.

There was a clever hack someone posted here a while ago about using the email alerts feature to essentially get a read-only feed of transactions from a bank account. It does require you to parse the email and build your own system, so it wouldn't work for most people.

i did this for personal use a while back, but the biggest issue i faced was that the merchant name in the email alert was truncated, so it wasn't the same level of info quality that mint/plaid can provide (since they have the complete merchant name)

Some banks do actually offer this.. Wells Fargo actually does (though I'm no longer a customer)

yes, you would think all banks would have or be required to provide a read only user/pass or api to your data, designed for this. This one reason I never used Mint. Great idea, but not providing them with your full account user and password.

Sorry, what I meant was - even if Plaid has username and password, they won't be able to login, at least with BofA, they ask security questions, image identification etc

I don't know if Plaid asks for those but other similar systems do (I know, unreal right?)

Are the credentials you’re providing them, they’re storing, and then using to scrape data scoped to read only permissions? They are not.

Some banks do allow you to create separate credentials that are restricted to read-only views of your account.

They have the capability to do whatever they please.

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