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Comment by btmerr | Hacker News Reader

We love Plaid, but we're different. We compete with other banks -- Chase, Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, Wells Fargo, etc.

Zach can speak for Plaid, but to my understanding they're focused on providing API's that improve banking experiences for existing banks and bank customers.

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Gotta say from an outsider's perspective, Seed [1] and Plaid [2] are pretty hard to distinguish from each other...

[1] The world's first business banking API

[2] The API for banking data

[1] https://seed.co/images/graphics/seed_logo_blue.png

[2] http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5572/15111751177_d74935b2b4.j...

Fair point. We'll work to do a better job of helping people understand what we offer. Our focus has been to get our API into the hands of our early customers as soon as possible.

Brian is right here. Plaid builds API infrastructure on top of existing FI's, whereas Seed is building a new bank. Maybe one day we can incorporate Seed as a data source into Plaid directly.

Interesting! Do you currently compete with banks or will you do so eventually? Are your products independent of the banks your APIs interface with?

We compete with banks, and also partner with them. Our model allows for multiple bank partners, but for the time being we're integrated with a single bank.

Our stuff is designed to be portable between banks where possible. There are only about half a dozen bank core systems in wide use in the US today, so in theory if we integrated with all of them we'd be able to partner with most any bank. To date we have integrated with two different cores.

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