Hey! Co-founder of Plaid (plaid.com) here. We take privacy extremely seriously, I'm actually an early privacy.com user and major fanboy. Privacy only has access to the information needed to authenticate your bank account and make sure you don't get over-drafted. They don't use any of our income or assets products.

Thanks whockey. Privacy and Plaid look very cool, and you're both solving interesting problems that need to be solved with the financial system.

Hey! Co-founder of Plaid (plaid.com) here. RH does not pull your transaction history, RH is only using Plaid to authenticate your ACH accounts to make sure your actually the owner of the account and so you don't get over-drafted. They're using our auth and balance product, feel free to check out what information we return on our docs (http://plaid.com/docs).

But they could potentially use you for more and users don't have insight into whether or not they do or if it will change.

Agreed there is no transparency around which endpoints are being used. There needs to be a screen that shows what data you’re providing like FB or Google login before you link anything.

Even the account balance is information they would not normally have and something most people consider personal and private.

Hey dawhizkid - co-founder of Plaid here. I can't give the rationale on why RH wrote the privacy policy the way they did, but I can guarantee you that they are not pulling transactional data. They're only using Plaid for the ACH authentication. If you'd like more insight feel free to shoot me a note at william at plaid dot com.

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

[0] https://plaid.com

> Teller... supports the top couple banks.

> 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.

>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

Citation needed. Clearly you have a competing product. I'm surprised to see you using HN to throw shade at a competitor without context.

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.

[0] https://plaid.com

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.

Though I'll admit, I'm quite biased!

Yep - we're free for the first 100 users!

What should I do to get my personal financial info? I signed up but the interface presented is one of an app maker not for end user

That is exactly what Plaid is... a tool for developers. Savvy users can use the Plaid API to build apps that use their users' financial data.

It's free to use if you have less than 100 users, so you could easily build your own tool to manage your personal data for free.

Neat! Def gonna check it out.

Wait, you just got $44 million in funding and you don't have 100 users yet?

Assuming this isn't a joke, he means if you were to build something with their api, it is free to you up to your 100th user.

Oh, right, now I understand.

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).

I think we may have set a record if that was the case...

But the other commenters are correct - the first 100 additions to the api are free.

Co-founder of Plaid[1] here. We build an API for developers to connect to their users bank accounts. All the 'startup-y Mints' are our clients.

[1] - https://plaid.com/

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?

Thanks for the kind words :)

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?

As ancient engineering wisdom says: 'The nice thing about standards is that we have so many of them'.

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.

Congratulations on the WSJ && HN feature. Great API, we use it in our product.

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.

They're an awesome client of ours! We also partnered with them on their ACH product[1].

[1] - https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-and-stripe/

Why is are the windows in the top banner moving? It is kind of trippy.

What countries do you have support for?

I'm working for a Canadian fintech startup that would truly benefit from a service like yours.

We're focusing on the US market right now - we'll definitely reach out when we move into the international markets. Stay tuned :)

Thanks.

I will definitely keep a close eye on your service. Here's hoping it comes soon to non-US bank accounts.

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!