> Our pricing is upfront
Because plaid does everything not to be transparent on their pricing.
However if your customer/sales support is superior you could win just on that. Plaids is terrible. Support tickets go weeks without responses, I need to speak to a sales guy just to enable UK/Canadian connections and still haven’t heard back after weeks of chasing. Other tickets can get left for similar amount of time too.
Plaid should get out of the way and make it fully self service to enable countries/features when you’re getting started, or fix their support/sales team so users aren’t waiting weeks to hear back from them just to enable a couple of countries they already support or confirm pricing.
With regards to pricing they also make it difficult as they don’t really explain the pricing well when you enable production either. They talk about “accounts” when their API talks about “items”. After enabling production my first bill confirmed (as no sales person ever responded to me on my question) that account was item, and not accounts the institution holds which would be extremely expensive! They don’t provide any examples on how the pricing works either, so you kind of have to figure it out after you enable production. AWS docs give a pricing example to help users understand how it works. Plaid should do the same or (again) improve their sales/support to answer questions on it promptly and not leave users hanging for weeks.
Anyway glad to see some competition here, if Stripe can match the $0.30 pricing, add UK/Canada and provide faster/better support they can win this market if Plaid doesn’t sort out support/sales quickly.
Their API and app-centric approach seem to be the only upshots, and even then, other banks have relatively good apps these days.
I hate the fact that physical banks (and cash) are disappearing. I don't have complicated needs as to the digital services I consume, same as many other people. Then online banks become indistinguishable from the next, and it is ability to contact real people that sets them apart.
The situation with cash is overall very bad. Try to pay with a 100 Euro note in smaller cities. Almost no one will accept it, including banks. I regularly see very frustated tourists who with cash in hand are left out in the cold.
Chase does at least for credit cards.
Betterment has app passwords, which is better than using your full password.
but at least I don't use their checking feature, which they're oddly excited about despite it having no advantage over other banks and no possible way it ever could have an advantage.
Why can’t the reason be “losing their only source of revenue to a competitor”? That seems like a fine reason to not want people to switch
PR is a hell of a marketing tactic.
But I think I remember seeing that some of Capital One's bank account offerings have some customer facing apis.
Plaid, Finicity, and Yodlee all purport to support both those direct connections with big banks and the long tail of smaller banks and credit unions. It reads like Stripe has built some direct connections (where possible) and is wrapping other providers for everyone else. That is also, as I understand it, what MX does.
https://financialdataexchange.org/FDX/The-Consortium/Members...
My question then, is: what is the upside here, then? As a hypothetical fintech developer, why do I choose Stripe for my use case over the established competition? Why would I want my end-user's credentials in transit between multiple companies, for the same price as the rest of the market, with no improvement in performance or uptime?
Our pricing is upfront: https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing. We’ve worked with a large beta group of users to make sure the pricing is in line with what they see in the market.