[_boffin_]

What a statement. What a statement. How many financial institutions do they support? How many different vendors supply the platform for those institutions? How many of those financal institutions (FI) don’t support oauth or other APIs? A lot! Then ask yourself: how do they talk get the data if no api? Web scraping. Then ask yourself how they build the scrapers for those? Where do those accounts come. Employees of the company who open up accounts at those FIs? What about all the other FIs? Where do you think those come from…? How do you think that process is secured? Think the process is secured enough to make you feel warm and cozy? When the scrapers are working, how do you think they get past the security measures? Do you think those financial institutions might think it’s odd that you’re logging in from multiple IPs and that one or more of those ips might be from a residential proxy network?

The result is that I attempt, at all cost to not use anything that requires plaid or their competitors since I know how that sausage is made.