[monkeybutton]

>service called Plaid that requires your bank username & password, which then screen scrapes your financial details

That is hefty accusation. Wouldn't doing that be illegal?

Edit: Looks like they have an entire controversies section on their wiki page and banks are suing them over said sketchy practices. Classy stuff.

[TheNewsIsHere]

Not if it’s not otherwise illegal and disclosed in the terms you agree to. As part of a settlement they now have a “privacy-centric” portal so you can manage what they know about you, ostensibly. But it’s difficult to find, and I would wager that most people who use the service don’t understand what they’re getting into.

Everyone seems to use it now, and it’s increasingly difficult to link accounts using ACH micro deposits because Plaid can be configured to disallow manual linking if the routing number corresponds to a bank they support logging into.

I simply don’t do business with companies that use Plaid in that manner, it’s a hard stop for me. My bank’s customer agreement specifically prohibits disclosing user credentials to any other party, and when support is confronted by that, they typically have no idea what to do with that other than say “Plaid is secure”.

[lief79]

I've never heard of this before, who's everyone? Which country are you talking about?

[TheNewsIsHere]

I’m not sure if they’re in other countries, but I’m referring to the US. As for who uses them: off the top of my head, for well known services: PayPal, Coinbase, YNAB, Truebill, Acorns, Venmo, Stripe has an integration, I think Mint?, the list goes on.

More often than not I encounter them when trying to link bank accounts to anything now, except with other banks.

They have a history of imitating bank login screens and not disclosing that they’re not your bank. They settled a few lawsuits about that in the past few years and are a little more upfront, but I wouldn’t expect the average user to reasonably understand the situation.

Visa tried to acquire them back in 2020 but dropped the plan.

[diggernet]

Visa probably got a look at their infrastructure, and saw liabilities that could expand to consume all of Visa.