[edwinarbus]

Edwin from Stripe here. Stripe does integrate directly with banks. In our beta period, most volume we’ve seen has been over bank APIs. Some banks do not have APIs—we use financial partners to connect with them, and we’re talking with many banks in hopes that they will enable direct API access soon.

Our pricing is upfront: https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing. We’ve worked with a large beta group of users to make sure the pricing is in line with what they see in the market.

[bspear]

Gotta love this spicy thread

[onelovetwo]

Especially the

> Our pricing is upfront

Because plaid does everything not to be transparent on their pricing.

[samirsd]

ditto

[michaelrhansen]

Ha I was thinking the same

[dgildeh]

The pricing looks higher than Plaid. $1.50 is way more than the $0.30 per linked bank Plaid charges.

However if your customer/sales support is superior you could win just on that. Plaids is terrible. Support tickets go weeks without responses, I need to speak to a sales guy just to enable UK/Canadian connections and still haven’t heard back after weeks of chasing. Other tickets can get left for similar amount of time too.

Plaid should get out of the way and make it fully self service to enable countries/features when you’re getting started, or fix their support/sales team so users aren’t waiting weeks to hear back from them just to enable a couple of countries they already support or confirm pricing.

With regards to pricing they also make it difficult as they don’t really explain the pricing well when you enable production either. They talk about “accounts” when their API talks about “items”. After enabling production my first bill confirmed (as no sales person ever responded to me on my question) that account was item, and not accounts the institution holds which would be extremely expensive! They don’t provide any examples on how the pricing works either, so you kind of have to figure it out after you enable production. AWS docs give a pricing example to help users understand how it works. Plaid should do the same or (again) improve their sales/support to answer questions on it promptly and not leave users hanging for weeks.

Anyway glad to see some competition here, if Stripe can match the $0.30 pricing, add UK/Canada and provide faster/better support they can win this market if Plaid doesn’t sort out support/sales quickly.

[iknowstuff]

Which banks have OAuth APIs? I would love to switch to one of those instead of exposing my password due to my bank's incompetence.

[conroy]

WellsFargo has some form of OAuth (https://developer.wellsfargo.com/). I know that YNAB (https://www.youneedabudget.com/) uses it.

[withinboredom]

I use Bunq here in the NL. I wish all banks would steal their APIs. The abilities I have as a dev are simply amazing.

https://doc.bunq.com/

[Tijdreiziger]

Bunq seems like a… suboptimal bank, though. They cost ~5x more than other NL banks, and by all accounts, their customer support is streets behind.

Their API and app-centric approach seem to be the only upshots, and even then, other banks have relatively good apps these days.

[cliftonc]

I am a very happy Bunq customer for 4+ years, and as a user of other Dutch banks (for a mortgage - ABN amro, in the past UK banks like FD), their overall service levels great - if I chat via the app I have always been helped quickly, flexibility with accounts, cards, automation via the APIs etc is absolutely worth the price hike. These are things I am happy to pay a few extra cups of coffee a month for as they make my life with an extended family much easier to manage day to day.

[rapnie]

Good service levels will be a real USP, I expect. In the Netherlands where physical banks are a dying breed (especially those that deal with money. Aforementioned ABN Amro doesn't let you change a 100 Euro bill into 2 fifty bills, for instance). Especially the elderly are lost in the digital world and need guidance. For my parents for instance, every website is like a completely different app they need to learn how to use and with layouts changing all the time this is an enormous struggle to them.

I hate the fact that physical banks (and cash) are disappearing. I don't have complicated needs as to the digital services I consume, same as many other people. Then online banks become indistinguishable from the next, and it is ability to contact real people that sets them apart.

[Tijdreiziger]

The cost-cutting wrt physical bank branches is just ridiculous. You can't even deposit or withdraw coinage at ABN AMRO branches anymore; they outsourced that to home improvement stores instead (yes, really).

[astrange]

Capital One does, but for some reason the connection process breaks if I have an ad blocker enabled even if I whitelist their domain.

Chase does at least for credit cards.

Betterment has app passwords, which is better than using your full password.

[websap]

Really happy Betterment implemented this. Hoping they’ll soon have some actions based Auth as well.

[astrange]

Unfortunately I did something wrong with a Betterment connection last week that caused them to lock my account for hacking attempts, until I call them, and their EST support hours are only in times I'm in meetings in PST so far…

but at least I don't use their checking feature, which they're oddly excited about despite it having no advantage over other banks and no possible way it ever could have an advantage.

[confounded]

I got blocked as fraudulent and banned before I could even transfer my savings in to Betterment. (No problems with Wealthfront, and now a happyish customer).

[FintechRisen]

Different aggregators will have different connections established based on relationships and also the priority of the bank. I've seen a ton of different options based on the fintechs apps I use from Plaid, MX, Finicity, etc. Long story short, it's usually the big banks. Different aggregators have different priorities around the amount of traffic they send over these connections though. Candidly I don't know why that is, but I have some hypotheses. Ultimately though you can assume all of the above names will have accounts like Chase, Wells, Citi, Cap One, BOA, US Bank etc.

[FintechRisen]

MX and Finicity both have OAuths to like 80+% of the top 20 financial institutions. There's a reason Plaid doesn't want people switching to them and it's hella sus

[conradev]

I believe Plaid was the one who got JPMorgan to build an OAuth API in the first place: https://finovate.com/plaid-signs-open-banking-agreement-with...

Why can’t the reason be “losing their only source of revenue to a competitor”? That seems like a fine reason to not want people to switch

[amonroe369]

Edit: cannot assure, but rumor on the street from peers, they were not the ones to get Chase to build OAuth.

PR is a hell of a marketing tactic.

[judge2020]

Plaid used oauth for Bank of America circa 2019 when I tried, and currently uses Capital One's oauth when I try to log into it. I'm sure they use it when it's convenience (or maybe when the financial institution mandates it).

[thekyle]

I know that Charles Schwab has some sort of OAuth flow which I used when connecting my account to TurboTax this year.

[lbotos]

So, I got very excited about this, but it seems that banks are expecting "bank integrator" aka companies, and not giving access to end users :( If any knows of a bank that has API access in the US do share!

[vineyardmike]

You might find luck using companies targeting algo trading. A lot of companies allow use of the account more like a checking account (eg interactive brokers). They have an API and also allow different logins to have different authorizations.

[jjeaff]

Mercury Bank has nice, friendly APIs. I believe they only do business bank accounts, though.

But I think I remember seeing that some of Capital One's bank account offerings have some customer facing apis.

[jackson1442]

chase has an OAuth flow but not every integration uses it.

[CincinnatiMan]

Capital One

[fjni]

they deserve a lot of credit for how early they built this and made it relatively broadly available!

[healthbjk]

Your documentation says you use service providers, specifically MX and Finicity. Is that correct or are you integrating directly (or some mixture)?

[mtrap]

There are ~10k depository institutions in the US. Maybe 20 of the largest offer OAuth connections (look at the list of FDX members for a good proxy).

Plaid, Finicity, and Yodlee all purport to support both those direct connections with big banks and the long tail of smaller banks and credit unions. It reads like Stripe has built some direct connections (where possible) and is wrapping other providers for everyone else. That is also, as I understand it, what MX does.

https://financialdataexchange.org/FDX/The-Consortium/Members...

[mandelbrotwurst]

He's saying it's a mixture.

[dakev]

I'm confused here. So from my understanding, Stripe plugs into the APIs of banks who already have them (like every other aggregator), then relies on existing aggregators for the 95% of banks who don't. In addition, your pricing is "in line" with "the market".

My question then, is: what is the upside here, then? As a hypothetical fintech developer, why do I choose Stripe for my use case over the established competition? Why would I want my end-user's credentials in transit between multiple companies, for the same price as the rest of the market, with no improvement in performance or uptime?

[sizzle]

Shots fired, good on Stripe for immediately clapping back to set the record straight…