I am getting my first exposure to a service called Plaid, they seem to be working with a lot of financial services apps, and in the process, force you to break the cardinal rule of the internet. The very first rule I learned online was NEVER GIVE YOUR USERNAME AND PASSWORD TO ANYBODY. Yet that is exactly what Plaid wants you to do, and what the apps using their service go gleefully along with an “ahh don’t worry about it” attitude. Personally I’m not so sure…
If you don’t know, Plaid is a 3rd party service who supposedly maintains your bank account credentials, accessing your account whenever they feel like it, downloading and sharing ALL your banking data for years, and basically has the run of the house as far as I can tell, with your bank data. Now maybe it’s me, but this don’t sound too reassuring, and goes against everything I’ve ever known about online security.
So I’m wondering, has anybody experienced Plaid, is anybody utilizing their service, has anyone given up their credentials to these people, can anyone defend this practice of requiring banking creds and limitless access to your account and data, I’d like to know because I feel like this is some kind of bizzarro world where everything I’ve ever known to be true aint true no more. I do know they are supposedly being bought out by Visa (5.3B), and have a gang of class action litigation on them. Any feedback would helpful Thanks and happy trading!!
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I would not provide my bank account credentials. Even if Plaid is on the up and up, if their servers were to get hacked it will compromise their clients big time.
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My Missus does NOT know the details you speak of - RUN LIKE F**K Away from these Scammers - or don’t come back whimpering to us in 3 months -when you’re skint !
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Well, I had the same reaction but apparently we are dinosaurs in the Fintech arena. I had never heard of this company until I tried to link a bank account to an exchange and was confronted with the request for my bank credentials, I ran, went to my next choice of exchanges and met with the same request, and no option to link the account any other way (ie: routing & acct #). That’s when I started investigating this situation and brother, was I shocked, Plaid is everywhere, linkable to every bank account and credit union account in the country:
> "In data illustrating Plaid’s scale and reach, management from the two companies said that Plaid connects more than 11,000 banks and financial services companies, as well as more than 2,600 FinTech firms, and touches more than 200 million accounts globally. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of accounts linked to Plaid has measured 115 percent since 2015.
> According to figures cited by Visa, 75 percent of “internet-enabled” customers around the globe have used a FinTech product and service — such as those from Acorn, Betterment, Venmo and others — to move money between accounts. That’s up from 18 percent in 2015."
Visa is acquiring Plaid for $5.3Billion, scammers?? Hardly, but again, I thought the same as you and don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable breaking the #1 online rule, even if it is the future of financial data transfer and aggregation. I’m getting too old for this…
If you’re interested to know more this article gives a pretty good explanation:
www(dot)forbes(dot)com/plaid-fintech/#1b7652b367f9
sorry, 7 years here and I’m still not allowed to post a link… lol
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