
Plaid in Canada - jessedhillon
https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-in-canada/
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VBprogrammer
I'm probably in the minority here but I was really expecting this to be about
Canada's relationship with the good old lumberjack shirt.

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zachperret
Haha, we've long joked that Plaid should launch a line of flannel shirts...

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crabl
This is FANTASTIC news, and as a Canadian interested in FinTech, I'm very
excited to be able to use Plaid here. I can only imagine that getting the "big
five" banks here to get on board with this would have amounted to a herculean
task, so congrats to William and the Plaid team for making this happen.

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jbob2000
I work for one of the banks listed as supported by Plaid. I am intensely
skeptical about the claims they say their API can provide, knowing how our
systems work internally.

Real-time transactions, for one, are not really real-time. There are many
things that get in the way of making these real-time and the issues go all the
way to the terminal where you swipe your card. Identity is also sketchy. Many
people still share bank accounts. It is an unwritten rule that an account !==
a person.

I'd be curious to know how they pull this information. There are some APIs
available, but we are careful to hand out access. If they're screen scraping,
then, well... god help them.

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crabl
Most applications won't need "real-time" data, so I think things like end-of-
day balances and transaction history are enough to cover 90% of the developer
use-cases. As far as Identity goes, if you're willing to fork out $500/mo +
fees for the production tier, you should be able to afford credit data from
Transunion or someone else, which is going to be far more reliable than
pulling ID info from bank accounts (for the reasons you stated).

I definitely share your concern about how the data gets pulled by Plaid, but
as far as I can tell most major banks that have mobile applications have
demonstrated that they are at least _marginally_ capable of developing high-
availability REST APIs that are reliable enough for purposes like this. I
wouldn't be surprised if Plaid somehow managed to get them to agree to using
the "mobile app" APIs for their application.

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mediocrejoker
Does this mean apps like Mint and YNAB will be able to stop asking for users
passwords and switch to something like OAuth with read-only privileges?

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Kluny
Speaking of Mint, has anyone else found it super buggy and unreliable? All of
my accounts seem to have incorrect numbers more often than not.

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what_ever
It's been very accurate for me and I have about 10 accounts connected with 6-7
institutions.

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Kluny
And you're Canadian?

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tazard
I'm Canadian, and I have found it to be fairly reliable with several accounts
from different parties. It gets mixed up when I buy something with PayPal in
USD, it says I have paid both the US amount, and the Canadian equivalent. And
it's categories aren't the smartest, but aside from that, everything works as
expected.

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fudged71
Canada is lacking in fintech apps for consumers. I'm excited to see more
companies expand north. There might not be many of us but we can be loud and
proud users (with really polite app reviews! ha)

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patientplatypus
Frankly, I'm super skeptical. Maybe I just don't get it, but it would seem to
me that what Plaid is claiming to do is somewhat magical.

It just seems to me, likely another poster pointed out, is that they would
have to partner with every single bank they want to deal with in order to send
the right credentialing steps in order to access their internal systems,
provided those systems even exist, OR, they would need to have access to a
mythical overarching API that inherits to all systems (which doesn't exist).
So somewhere in their platform there is a `Step 2) A miracle occurs`, and I
just have a hard time believing that they can just gloss over noticing that
before giving at least a motivation for the miracle. I mean if my money were
at stake and I wanted to pay for the service (and my business' money would be
at stake too!) I'd want at least a little bit of a guarantee that the service
works as advertised and is totally above board.

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deft
Can I use this as an individual to get my transaction history?

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zachperret
Plaid founder here. Yes - our development environment is unpaid and many
people use it for personal budgeting. You can sign up here:
[https://dashboard.plaid.com/signup](https://dashboard.plaid.com/signup)

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shazow
This is fantastic, thank you!!

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filereaper
Last time I looked at services like Mint, etc...

You have to give out your main login credentials used to access your bank.

If anything happens to these downstream processors, the bank provides no
support as you gave away your main login credentials.

My "Big 5" Canadian Bank won't provide read-only login credentials so using
these type of services is a complete no-go from my end.

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tixocloud
It's really great news and am looking forward to seeing what fintech
applications I can build to disrupt the industry.

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Waterluvian
Build an app that allows me to get notifications when debit transactions are
made. Even if it's minutes or hours late.

I LOVE that I get an email every time my credit card is used. But my debit
doesn't have that option.

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tixocloud
What does the email contain? Are you mainly using it for tracking personal
spending or just making sure you're aware when fraud happens?

FWIW, I'm thinking more into personal spending atm.

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Waterluvian
Both. I'll sometimes get a bill payment and immediate notice, "oh hey that's
higher than usual. I ought to see why"

Also when I travel, it saves my butt all the time. Its how I detected a hotel
totally screwing up the accomodation bill. Also gives me insight into exchange
rate so I don't fool myself on prices.

Email contains vendor name, date, and price in Canadian dollars.

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tixocloud
As part of testing out the API, I’d be happy to try it out and see how well it
works although if all the other bank apps have it, then it kinda defeats the
purpose.

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Waterluvian
Yeah. Makes sense. Too bad. :)

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jeromegv
Any planned support for Desjardins?

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cr_huber
does plaid store you credentials? or how does it authenticate to the bank?

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findjashua
you provide your bank credentials to the 3rd party app, which forwards them to
Plaid

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tixocloud
Will I be able to use Plaid to capture assets/investments as well?

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charleyma
Plaid can pull balance information for asset + investments accounts, so
typically the size of the portfolio

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philip1209
Still no SVB support for Plaid, which most tech companies use :-(

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zachperret
Yes, this really bugs me too. Unfortunately, the issue is on SVB's side. We're
continuing to work on it, but I'd also recommend raising this with SVB
directly if you are a customer.

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dmead
Whats svb?

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jeandenis
Silicon Valley Bank -- business accounts are used by a ton of startups in the
bay area.

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rebelidealist
Does this work with the Stripe integration?

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stuaxo
I was hoping it was the band.

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lpgauth
No HSBC support :(

