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Comment by pgrote | Hacker News Reader

For those like myself that are unaware of what Plaid does: https://plaid.com/what-is-plaid/

"Connecting your bank to your apps We power thousands of the apps that people rely on to manage their financial lives.

Venmo (peer-to-peer payments) Betterment (automated investing) Chime (online banking) Dave (earned wage access) And thousands more..."

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It’s absolutely insane to me that people willingly give their bank credentials to random third party companies. Plaid (and others) are basically mitm as a service and they’ve built a billion dollar business because banks live technologically in the stone age

It's amazing... amazing to me the confused looks I get from people when they start telling me their venmo credentials or whatever and I just hand them a 20 dollar bill for my share of lunch.

It's exhausting explaining to people that I am fine with them having an extra dollar and two cents over what I owe if the alternative is giving my fucking banking password to some california cowboy company that doesn't have to follow banking regulations.

> some california cowboy company that doesn't have to follow banking regulations.

Oh they do legally need to follow most banking regulations. That many “fintech” companies don’t do regulatory training and compliance will result in hefty fines and shutdowns. The FDIC, FTC, OTS, etc. are pretty humorless and fairly efficient and effective.

I bet 99% of people think they are actually securely logging in to their bank.

I wonder what the fallout will be if plaid eventually gets hacked.

Now of course, if only banks implemented some kind of OAuth instead of relying on a third-party logging into your account as you...

Banks are already doing that with openid. See partners of https://yes.com/ (European)

Plaid would still have a place, as they could manage connecting applications to every bank in the US (so you don't have to use different client libraries for every single bank, because god knows they won't pick a common setup).

I'm really surprised they haven't gotten BofA to give them access to their consumer accounts API, considering Plaid can't deal with BofA's SMS 2FA. It's the largest bank in the US and Plaid can't handle it, which shows how fragile the whole scraping thing really is.

https://teller.io/ is trying to do something like this.

The fact that Plaid has been so successful convincing so many consumers to enter their banking credentials into random, unverified third party sites (with no verification whatsoever that you're even talking to Plaid in the first place) is pretty amazing to me.

Goes to show, if so many people are willing to trade their financial security for convenience, is it any wonder that they'll trade their privacy for convenience?

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