Plaid CTO here. This is not accurate. On 1. We do not (and have never) sell data to third parties. On 2. We have been a proponent of open authentication standards like OAuth and App2App and today, a majority of our bank connections run via bank APIs - in fact, as Zach pointed out, we’ve helped many financial institutions move towards OAuth. We don’t want to handle credentials in the long-term. However it will take years for a full transition to APIs to happen with more than 11k banks in the United States and we feel that it's important to support the tens of millions of Americans who bank at those institutions.
Considering everything, Zach and Plaid had to walk back all of your BS about Stripe stealing everything. Under the hood, Plaid lost to MX and Finicity with Stripe, and then accused Stripe of impropriety. Stripe isn't a moral leader in this world by any means. Plaid though? You are even worse because you act smug as an organization.
There were whistle blowers in 2018 who said Plaid did sell data and I am not sure anything came of it. Why collect more information than necessary in your screen scraping? Something is not adding up.
