I'm interested to see where this goes. I use Plaid as a developer, and it feels like the user experience keeps getting worse. This isn't Plaid's fault, but as more and more financial institutions require 2FA, it gets much less automatic for Plaid to scrape data.
Instead of just seeing updated transactions, users frequently need to enter a 2FA code before Plaid can successfully complete the update. This is very clunky, especially if you've linked 10+ accounts. Hopefully, Plaid (or even government regulations) will be able to encourage banks to create real APIs and Plaid can move away from scraping entirely.
Wasn’t YC company Standard Treasury trying to help banks become more API accessible? If the banks have an API an offering, I can see how a standard would need to exist to support the primary use cases (auth, balance, transaction), and perhaps Plaid is showing what they could look like (reducing the complexity of interfacing disparate banks’ approaches to managing bank data). [NB: if there is a standard or info I am clearly not knowledgeable of based upon this comment, please educate me!]
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We're the team behind Standard Treasury and the Silicon Valley Bank API Banking Platform which forms the backend for Stripe Atlas - we're the experts in this space.
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The main differences are how we're working with banks. Back then we sold only to large banks, plus banks weren't yet comfortable using cloud services, meaning everything had to be built on-premise (very silly). Now we sell into all sizes of bank because we're able to operate with a SaaS model.
Likewise for developers that means we can move much faster and there's a much better chance we'll be able to find a bank that's a good fit for you. If you're interested in using the API, email me and say hi: hello@treasuryprime.com
Instead of just seeing updated transactions, users frequently need to enter a 2FA code before Plaid can successfully complete the update. This is very clunky, especially if you've linked 10+ accounts. Hopefully, Plaid (or even government regulations) will be able to encourage banks to create real APIs and Plaid can move away from scraping entirely.