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Comment by bdangubic | Hacker News Reader

I do not understand this at all. How is ID verification settling on banks????! And which of these banks are private?

Sorry if I was inexact in my wording. It's settling on the existence of your bank account proving who you are. The ID services require you to give them your bank login credentials (ie, Plaid). So there are two levels of denial, at Plaid (and related ID services) themselves and the banks deciding weather or not they want to allow it (work with Plaid, or Plaid with them, etc) and if they want to give you a bank account.

I work at Plaid. Plaid's KYC product doesn't ask for bank login credentials. (EDIT: I originally had a line in here saying "nor do any of our competitors' KYC products, that I know of." but then someone in this thread linked to Stripe documentation saying that Stripe does use this method of age verification in Australia, so TIL.)

I almost swore here but I think that'd not get my message across. So I'll be calm. You're a liar (edit: or ignorant). I tried with Plaid. Plaid explicitly required my bank login credentials. I went in physically and talked face to face to my US bank's employee that handled Plaid.

Plaid does have products that do request bank credentials, but those products are not used for age verification. It's very common that a given customer-facing flow will use multiple Plaid products together to handle multiple different customer needs, so it's likely that the flow you were working with was using multiple Plaid products and requesting bank credentials, but for a different reason than to perform age verification (for example, KYC + bank account ownership verification or KYC + bank account validity verification).

Right. This boils down to you saying you were wrong but trying to avoid saying it directly. Basically,

>"Requiring a bank account credentials is common and yes, Plaid does it, despite what I said before, when the company buying Plaid services wants even more legal butt covering as is common in the wild."

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