Venmo asks for your bank's username and password to verify your account

Here's the CTO reply later on in this conversation.

> Plaid CTO here. We’ve worked closely w/ FIs to move towards standards like OAuth & App2App to remove the use of credentials. A vast majority of our traffic is already going through these APIs today and we're working with more and more banks to enable OAuth.

Plaid is contracted by Venmo (and many others) to provide a bank-agnostic API to Venmo, and either uses credentials or token-based or app-based methods depending on how competent the bank is. Apparently Simon's bank only offers the credentials method.

When I recently bought a property my bank had a way of verifying my account to the mortgage lender that did not require me to give my password to anyone. It was a temporary read-only look to verify that I had the down payment. Why can't Venmo use similar procedures?

Banking hasnt switched to oAuth. Robinhood switched to Plaid and it loggs in as you to your bank. I researched it and believe it or not this is how they do it still.

Never trust anyone with your banking credentials. If Venmo insists, look for an alternative like cash.app.