Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mbesto 1511 days ago
> A lot of comments here saying that this is the death knell for Plaid, but I wouldn't be so sure.

The fact that no one has mentioned Yodlee once makes me think very few people in this thread actually know this market.

Not to mention there are probably quite literally thousands of Stripe competitors.

The world is a big place and the SV bubblethink of "only one person wins" is highly myopic.

Plaid will be fine. They just might not be $10B valuation fine. That's all.

EDIT: Doh, saw Yodlee mentioned once much lower in thread now.

1 comments

As someone intimately familiar with the space Yodlee is often not mentioned for a few reasons. But their ability to handle the long tail of accounts is the biggest reason it’s often not considered. When you’re trying to maximize the ability for people to access your service (and require a bank account or related information to do so) there is really no comparison to plaid. Further, plaid long had a better developer experience than yodlee and for some amount of time was much cheaper (thanks to enterprise discounts in exchange for prominence in leading apps)in a few cases.

People likely aren’t familiar with yodlee and maybe it’s an indication they’re not aware of the space. But for those who are - I’d not have mentioned it either, they barely touch plaid on many facets.

Edit: I know in one particular instance we “considered” yodlee at what is now considered a big consumer banking unicorn. But in no way was actually considered. It was used as a negotiation tool.

> But their ability to handle the long tail of accounts is the biggest reason it’s often not considered.

According to a few google searches, this is simply not true:

Yodlee supports 14k banks and Plaid supports 11k banks

I personally have used Kubera as a consumer who use both Plaid and Yodlee to connect to banks. I have ~3 bank accounts (that represent great candidates for long tail) that simply do not work with EITHER service provider. Having spoken to the support staff from Kubera (who are great btw) they prefer to use Plaid for some of the reasons you mention, but not because its all encompassing.

Categorizing Yodlee as "they barely touch plaid" is simply disingenuous. Much of the functionality is comparable, it's just MUCH better on Plaid for both the developer and the consumer in terms of overall experience.