I recently needed to add a personal Chase account to a business Chase account to send a transfer.

I kid you not, their own account linking flow used Plaid to collect my Chase(!) personal credentials and verify my Chase(!!!) personal account, within their own web UI while actively signed into my account.

Granted, there is capability in that UI to link any external account, so you can sign into other banks. But I mean come on...at least implement something secure for your own damn accounts!

You can almost smell the internal bureaucracy and dysfunction.

This may be a case of an external account in practice. There are many banks running the retail and business accounts under a similar corp name, but in practice they're separate entities which don't share infrastructure or processes.

(I'd love to know the reason, I'm sure someone here knows the details)

There’s just very little way around it :/ if I want to transfer money between different banks or services it’s usually much faster by giving out your creds. Worse, if I want to do my taxes Turbotax simplifies that whole process tremendously if I give them creds for all my financial services... it’s pretty crazy how much trouble you must be willing to accept to avoid leaking your creds.

It’s the Uber/Airbnb model. Plaid does something totally unacceptable as a trade off for a good service. Eventually the bank APIs will catch up, Plaid will become secure, and they’ll have the dominant market position with a high cost of entry.

I mean PayPal still right now today does it for the “verify your bank account” feature.

I don't think they do in Australia... how odd.

As far as I recall this article is accurate. They send two small amounts and ask you to type it in to confirm it came through.

https://www.paypal.com/au/smarthelp/article/how-do-i-confirm...