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Comment by kalev | Hacker News Reader

I’d like to see a comparison between for example Stripe and Plaid. I see some use case examples on the Plaid website, but it is still all pretty vague to me. Can plaid be used like a regular PSP? How does it compare to Stripe transactions? And Stripe Connect?

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They provide mostly non-overlapping features. Stripe = get paid. Plaid = connector into banking data (transaction history on a checking account, or the account # itself, for example). So, if you need to accept payments, or send money, you'd lean towards Stripe. If you instead wanted to get access to a user's financial data, such as if you are writing a budgeting app or personal financial management application, you'd lean towards Plaid.

Interesting, I might have thought there would be some overlap because Plaid allows to initiate payments. Why wouldn’t it be possible to initiate a payment from a users personal account to my business account?

https://plaid.com/use-cases/consumer-payments/ https://plaid.com/docs/quickstart/#setting-up-for-payment-in...

It's possible, but nobody does this because the friction to link an account with plaid is very high. You need to pick your bank then give your username and password to your bank (and potentially a 2fa code etc). All this just to get an ACH and routing number.

Plaid's true value add is normalized access to transactions and other banking metadata. Using it only for payments is not a good UX.

I work at Plaid and I agree that using Plaid just for getting an ACH and routing number leaves a lot of value on the table. You're getting more than an ACH number and and routing number though -- you're also getting proof that the person can log in to the bank account associated with that account/routing number combo, which is really helpful for fraud reduction -- fraud in online payments is a huge problem and part of the reason many of our customers use us. (You also get, if you want it, a token that you can use directly with Stripe, Dwolla, etc. to do the funds transfer.) Another popular use case is to use the Plaid Auth API for ACH and routing number, but then also use the Plaid Identity API (again, for fraud reduction) and/or the Balance API (to help make sure that the payment won't bounce).

That was wat I was worried about as well. Thank you for making it clear to me.

Plaid is not a payment service at all. There's almost no overlap.

Plaid is mostly a screen-scraper of banking data. Users give you their banking credentials and plaid gives you scraped transaction history.

https://plaid.com/use-cases/consumer-payments/ https://plaid.com/docs/quickstart/#setting-up-for-payment-in...

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