
Plaid Launches in France, Spain, and Ireland - charleyma
https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-in-france-spain-and-ireland/
======
whitepoplar
Something I've always worried about: if I provide my bank's login credentials
to a service which uses Plaid/Yodlee and due to a security breach my bank
account is somehow drained, who's liable? Most banks explicitly state that
losses due to sharing of credentials are not protected by their fraud
guarantees. Are customers at risk by using Plaid?

~~~
sitharus
My bank has explicitly told me that using Pliad/Yodlee violates their T&Cs and
voids their entire online fraud protection, regardless of if one of those
services is at fault.

~~~
sbmthakur
Which bank is this, if I may ask?

Most of the popular Financial Institutions seem to be on board with Plaid.

------
StavrosK
I've been using Plaid for a toy project for a while, and, while it works well,
what surprised me the most was their support. I had an issue with my bank not
sending me SMS and their support was quick and helpful, responding to my
problem with actual feedback rather than canned responses.

Now that I'm saying this, I realize what a low bar our current support climate
has set, but Plaid is great on that regardless.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Would you be interested in sharing your project?

~~~
CamelCaseName
My guess is that the project he's referring to is IMGZ (found via his HN
profile then his twitter)

You can read more about that here: [https://imgz.org/](https://imgz.org/)

In addition, he has a page on his site with some really cool personal
projects: [https://www.stavros.io/projects/](https://www.stavros.io/projects/)

~~~
StavrosK
Haha, no, it's not that. I just used Plaid to get my own balances so I can
track my finances, it was nothing exciting.

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masterjack
What is Plaid's long-term competitive advantage? It made sense when scraping
was the only solution (albeit an extremely dangerous one) but now banks are
launching their own APIs, which is allowing some competitors to come in with
free bank account linking. A few simple features address most of the needs of
a typical fintech, and I don't think anyone is happy with having to integrate
Plaid's SDK nor pay their rates.

~~~
hidiegomariani
bank's APIs are extremely limited as of right now. Fragmentation is also very
high. It is also true that this may change in the future, but not very soon

~~~
masterjack
Fragmentation is definitely high. Although if you can seamlessly fall back to
other services, a handful of bank integrations can get you ~80% of the
customers.

I haven't worked with Open Banking, how is it? In the US, for bank transfers,
NACHA files are fairly easy to work with, as long as you can access and verify
bank account numbers (ideally get balance and identity information too). I
think all the APIs support this, eg:
[https://developer.wellsfargo.com/apis/payments/account-
valid...](https://developer.wellsfargo.com/apis/payments/account-validation-
services)

It's hard to tell how quickly things will change and improve. Banks should
have an incentive to work on this, since it will give them more control of
their data and logins, potentially lowering liabilities and hack potential.

------
burgerzzz
I've been really impressed by Plaid's service, but also the level of customer
support they provide. I have been experiencing issues connecting CapitalOne
accounts in the Plaid test environment. I let them know, and got a long,
thought out response, and I'm not even a paying customer yet.

Congrats Plaid!

~~~
Scoundreller
I love it when companies realize that a problem impacting a « free » customer
could impact their paying customers too.

It’s like, free beta test report so you don’t piss off your real customers.
Maybe not something to just trash.

------
JonoBB
Having previously used Yodlee, I'm now migrating onto Plaid in the UK.

Speaking from a documentation and API point of view, you can more or less
think of Yodlee as PayPal and Plaid as Stripe.

Yodlee still covers WAY more banks than Plaid in the world, so we still need
to use them for some countries.

------
shostack
For those who have used Plaid for personal projects, can someone confirm if
you can pull basic monthly stats by account for all account types, including
cash, debt (CC/mortgage), and assets (investment accounts, etc.), and then net
worth and net income, all while on the free or pay as you go plans?

It appears from the docs that I'd need to pay $500/mo for very basic stats for
anything not cash account balance related which is not feasible for my
personal use.

My current alternative is Mint which is really lacking in the "automating my
own spreadsheet with the data" department.

~~~
kevindkeogh
pocketsmith ([https://www.pocketsmith.com/](https://www.pocketsmith.com/)) is
a pretty good solution for this. I was a Mint user that was concerned about
the privacy and also looking for a service that provided an API. I'm not 100%
sure about the privacy, but they do provide an API for your own financial
data.

------
ignoramous
Can someone pls ELI5 how Plaid, Yodlee, AuthLayer are valid businesses and not
hit with regulatory hurdles? They seem to be scraping bank websites behind the
scenes. Whilst I have no idea abt the US/EU market, I know for a fact that
most banks do charge exorbitant fees to access accounts over APIs (esp if
you're a BigCo and need that kind of control). Surely, the banks can't be
happy abt that? Surprising they haven't lobbied yet against this or aren't
stampeding all over Plaid et al with lawsuits?

~~~
namdnay
Per PSD2, the banks have to offer APIs. It’s already possible in Europe to see
your balances from another bank on your primary banks app

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franciscop
The Spanish translation is awkward. Not the level of Google Translate, but
still not looking native. This will make many people not trust it with their
bank credentials IMHO.

"Esta aplicación usa Plaid para conectar su banco"

This is missing a connector like:

"Esta aplicación usa Plaid para conectar a su banco"

Or change the whole sentence:

"Plaid se conecta a su banco con esta aplicación"

"Plaid se quiere a vincular a su banco" (if "Plaid" and "this application" are
the same)

And of course, everything still sounds way too formal and old-school. Looking
at the English site, it's clear it wants to transmit a young startup vibe. But
the Spanish version sounds like an old boring bank app more than a young
useful one. Either it's been translated by non-natives, or translated very
individual sentences without context, or by someone in Latin-America (the
Spanish over South America in general is a lot more formal sounding for
Spaniards).

------
maerF0x0
Wow, congratulations to the team! Amazing to break through regulatory barriers
and make new things possible.

~~~
namdnay
Why break? They’re leveraging PSD2, not breaking it

~~~
toomuchtodo
Thanks Europe for using regulation (PSD2) to open up banking to fintech
startups. Would anyone be interested in joining me in championing similar
legislation in the US through congressional representatives, the Federal
Reserve, and FDIC?

~~~
capableweb
I don't know PSD2 fully but I know that my bank rolled out support for it and
as far as I gather, applications should not have to ask for my
username/password via their own UI (which after testing Plaid, they do), but
rather use the authentication systems from the banks to authenticate. Maybe I
used it wrong though.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Your understanding is correct. It's an OAuth2-type mandate for banking
services providers.

[https://transferwise.com/gb/blog/what-is-
psd2](https://transferwise.com/gb/blog/what-is-psd2)

------
caseyf7
Developers should refuse to use Plaid. Plaid abuses its account privileges and
takes much more than it gives the users. For instance, Carta should never need
Plaid to pull every transaction from a bank account just to let someone
exercise stock options.

------
xtiansimon
Hmm. I thought this was about the electronic music duo Andy Turner and Ed
Handley [1] on Warp Records [2].

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaid_(band)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaid_\(band\))

[2]:
[https://bleep.com/music/artist/27-plaid](https://bleep.com/music/artist/27-plaid)

[https://m.soundcloud.com/bleep_bot/bleep-warp-records-
plaid-...](https://m.soundcloud.com/bleep_bot/bleep-warp-records-plaid-3rd-
february-2019)

------
billfruit
I am kind of suspicious of Plaid stage managing their coverage on HN. I've had
a Plaid employee recommend Plaid to me on a comment on a different finance
related thread. If it was recommending a tool or utility it would have been
fine,but recommending a paid service of your employer looks very close to
commercial solicitation.

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lancesells
Can anyone use Plaid and then start connecting to banks? I think the product
makes complete sense but it's always a little worrisome that it's seemingly
easy for anyone to launch an app that connects to your bank account. From what
I know in the US you're not covered by the FDIC by connecting through the API.

~~~
capableweb
No, seems there is steps for validating each "stage" that the created app for
connecting to banks has to go through. See this screenshot:
[https://i.imgur.com/1w7YUnf.png](https://i.imgur.com/1w7YUnf.png)

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vsuqf
And what is that? From the front page, "Plaid is the easiest way for users to
connect their bank accounts to an app." Why would I want to do that? This
smells like an attempt of bringing the concept of a credit score to Europe, is
that what it is?

~~~
justinhj
Nope. It provides an API so that you can make apps that can do things like
read your bank statement, get the balance, and many other things.

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llsf
Does anyone know if European SEPA actually overlap with Plaid here ? Was SEPA
supposed to "commoditize" the whole "grant access to my bank account to
3rdparty" ?

~~~
capableweb
No (AFAIK), SEPA is meant for facilitate bank transfers (cashless payments)
across the members of SEPA. Basically taking the fragmented system across
Europe and try to unify it under something to make things easier across the
region.

------
hadrien01
Does anyone have the list of banks supported? On their website they only link
to their WS to fetch them instead of a simple list

------
wbrasky
I read that as "Paid lunches"

------
nikolay
Plaid should be sued by asking people to disable their 2FA! For example, Bank
of America and Wells Fargo provide APIs, but Plaid is not using them -
instead, they advise me to turn off my 2FA just so that they can steal my
banking data. They should be out of business. It's not 2000, it's 2019! Not to
mention, their service is SOOO expensive!

