Plaid is not some tiny startup... They're almost 10 years old and Visa tried to buy them for $5B a couple years ago.

That doesn't mean you should trust them (I don't), but just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they're not big.

Venmo offers the traditional verify a deposit amount validation method too, it just takes a few days. It’s an either or method.

To clarify -- Venmo doesn't get the credentials at all, only Plaid does. Venmo then uses an API to get the specific bank account data it needs from Plaid.

I still don't trust Plaid.

Venmo could also get the credentials if they want to, since they're launching it from within their own app. They could keylog everything in their app if they wanted to, including what happens inside Plaid.

Nobody should ask for passwords to anything but their own service. Period.

Asking for bank passwords should be made illegal. If I were the president I would have made that a federal law yesterday.

The president doesn't make legislation.

Plaid provides a useful service that's a stop gap for the poor infrastructure of banks. I honestly doubt that most banks would have even bothered to start the laborious process of OAuth without them being an extremely popular middle layer for services like YNAB. My company actually uses them to process recurring payments.

Yeah well I would have also made it a law for banks to support OAuth and hardware key 2FA, hand out 2 Yubikeys to every citizen and ban SMS, among other things.

Plaid is not useful if they need to ask for passwords.