Hey all - co-founder of Plaid[0]. Congrats to Steve - great to see some innovation across the pond!
There were a bunch of questions about Plaid and the difference. The obvious one is that Teller is UK only and supports the top couple banks, Plaid is US only and supports thousands of financial institutions. If you need both UK and US coverage - since we both have pretty developer friendly APIs - it seems like a nice combo! Steve/Teller have also taken a bit of an antagonistic approach and has not worked with the banks - time will see if this proves successful, but we've taken the approach to work directly with the banks (as investors, clients, data-partners etc.).
Hope that helps and if you have any other questions/comments feel free to shoot me an email at william [at] plaid.com
> Plaid... supports thousands of financial institutions.
While this is technically correct, I feel this is a little disingenuous. In the UK we have a far concentrated banking industry, at least in retail banking, in that the vast majority (I'd guess >99%) of current accounts or similar are held with maybe 6-7 well known high-street banks. We also do not yet have a shared banking API format.
In the US, there are a very large number of smaller credit unions, and many banks/credit unions support the same API format (that I believe Mint.com etc use), and have done for a long time.
So I feel this is disingenuous because a) there are fewer banks to integrate with in the UK, and b) the game of integrations here is much tougher.
Hey all - co-founder of Plaid[0] here. First congrats to Stevie - awesome to see Teller launch - great to see some innovation on the other side of the pond. Looks like a great product!
There’s quite a few differences between Plaid and Teller - an obvious one being that Teller is UK only and Plaid is US only! Feel free to email me (william at plaid.com) if you’d like to talk through anything about Plaid.
Totally understand on the duplicate issue - its a hard problem to solve with the inconstancies from the end financial institution, and it definitely caused issues for us in the past. That being said - we've spent the past couple months making some huge improvements - I definitely encourage you to give it another shot.
I believe that would 100 users for the service that you would write using their api. See bottom of this page: https://plaid.com/products/ (playing around with the api to help make a self-use budgeting app - under the current terms, this use case would be free).
This API looks really shiny and well documented, kudos!
Do you only screen scrape or have backend/backoffice/negotiated integrations with various banks? How do you deal with enduser bank credential storage (both technically and legally when dealing with bank ToS)?
Also, in your experience, have any standards like OFX actually achieved critical mass for adoption amongst banks, and has that made your team's lives any easier?
For the top 14 banks we work closely with the banks to build connections - however for the smaller and mid-size banks we work and connect with a variety of vendors that serve those banks.
I personally sit on the OFX consortium (and a couple other financial standards committees) and I'm not overly bullish. I'll just leave this link here.... https://xkcd.com/927/
That XKCD strip is very true for financial standards. :(
I think you missed a question (unless it was intentional :), but how do you deal with enduser bank credential storage (both technically and legally when dealing with bank ToS)?
For example, on the technical side, do you store the credentials themselves or just session tokens/cookies?
I believe some of the data aggregation is done by reverse engineering APIs of mobile banking apps. You can easily do that by setting up MITM proxy to intercept requests. In some cases, you may need to decompile app binaries to decipher password encryption algorithms.
Awesome job btw. I love the site redesign, but it has always been quite good aesthetically. If I could hijack this comment briefly, I would like to ask how you see yourself vs. Stripe, who has a lot of advantages in the payments information space, having their own payment infrastructure and the banks recently fighting aggragators including yodlee.
Plaid.com | Software Engineer, Data Engineer, Product Manager, Designer, or Product Support Engineer | Remote or Onsite (San Francisco). More at https://plaid.com/careers
Hey all co-founder of Plaid here. We’re working to democratize financial services
by enabling anyone to hook up to their users (or their own) bank accounts. We're live with the top 15 banks in the US - you can check out our docs here (https://plaid.com/docs). We help power some amazing companies like Venmo, Stripe, charity:water, Coinbase and Capital One.
Feel free to email me at william[at]plaid.com or jobs[at]plaid.com if you're interested.
We (https://plaid.com) - are currently looking for some contract or full-time technical writers. Shoot me an email (william [at] plaid.com) if you're interested!
Total transparency, I'm one of the co-founders of Plaid[1]. Plaid's at the center of this in the US so we've been following this standard closely. It's exciting to see Europe and the UK taking this step forward - I'm hopeful that there will be some exciting news coming from the US pretty soon. More transparency and accessibility in this space is crucial - at the end of the day it has to be about enabling developers to build new products and enabling consumers to have real choice, while at the same time preserving (sometime arduous) compliance and security needs. If anyone ever wants to nerd out about banking standards or get involved feel free to shoot me an email at william[at]plaid.com.
That is a really cool service. I can't help but notice, though, that the example on your front page sends bank credentials over http instead of https. Is that particularly wise?
A friend and I are about to launch a personal finance app, and I would absolutely love to integrate this. Right now we just support banks that support Direct Connect. Any chance I can get in? ;)
Plaid Technologies - plaid.io
San Francisco, CA - Internship - Developers & Designers
Plaid makes it simple for any developer or application to link with credit and debit card spending data. In the process, we're generating one of the largest transactional data sets in the world, and using machine learning and statistical analysis to draw insights about how consumers spend their time, money, and attention.
We're a small, all engineering team - looking to bring on more ambitious, fun team members. Our stack is made up of Node, Hadoop and Hive with Mongo and Redis. We're looking for experienced generalists, and prefer fast learners to specific experience with our stack. Whether you're a mobile developer, data scientist, or or a resident philosopher we'd love to hear from you.
There were a bunch of questions about Plaid and the difference. The obvious one is that Teller is UK only and supports the top couple banks, Plaid is US only and supports thousands of financial institutions. If you need both UK and US coverage - since we both have pretty developer friendly APIs - it seems like a nice combo! Steve/Teller have also taken a bit of an antagonistic approach and has not worked with the banks - time will see if this proves successful, but we've taken the approach to work directly with the banks (as investors, clients, data-partners etc.).
Hope that helps and if you have any other questions/comments feel free to shoot me an email at william [at] plaid.com
[0] https://plaid.com