Comment by mitchellst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchellst | Hacker News Reader

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- Plaid is hardly alone in its competitive space. Even if Finicity sucks and SynapseFi is mid-implosion, they don't have a corner on capabilities like this indefinitely. MX is pretty alright.

- That ignores FANG platforms that could implement similar money-moving features.

- Stripe trotted out their "Banking as a Service" APIs today.

- Let's not forget the Chinese giants that have obviated the day-to-day need for credit card networks in their country, whose strategists (and imitators) are eyeing global markets.

If Visa's approach to this competitive threat is really acquire-and-kill, I hate to break it to them but... not even they can afford it. With all the innovation and competition in the space, best case scenario is that they bought themselves a year. And it turns out that, oops, Plaid wasn't even the closest. Stripe was.

The case for monopolistic harm is slim. Even if there was monopolistic intent, it was probably incompetent.

Plaid is still (for some unknown reason) the only company that is able to do real time ACH transactions that bypass credit card companies in the US. All other companies still require long verification processes or high transaction fees.

Plaid doesn’t do ACH transactions, someone else does, e.g. Stripe, or Dwolla. They merely provide a means to verify account details instantly per NACHA rules.

Plaid is planning to do ACH payments themselves and have a private beta.

They basically guarantee the funds to the merchant and reduce the likelihood that the cash won’t be there. The other side of the coin is providing insurance against fraudulent charges. This only really matters where physical goods are exchanged.

No they don’t guarantee any funds whatsoever, nor do they provide insurance against fraudulent charges.

If the fintech revolution is just around the corner, then how about we just delay these acquisitions a little just to safe?

(In reality, I think the only fintech revolution that might be around the corner is new services the federal reserve rolls out)

In the meantime there is RTP https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp

Can you share a link of the new service by the Fed? I wanted to show it to somebody, but I don't know what it's called so it doesn't turn up on Google.

FedNow - https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/what-i...

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