alt Hacker NewsI’ve been asked to sign up to plaid by clients three times. Each time I’ve said no. I’m not giving a 3rd party access to my bank account. I don’t understand how people enable this total loss of friction for direct account egress. There needs to be friction.
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Refinancing a loan I passed on the lowest possible rate I could get, for a slightly higher one, specifically because they used Plaid.
I'm not the most privacy-focused individual, not nearly as paranoid as I could be, but Plaid's model is an OBVIOUS step too far.
One thousand times this. I am not giving away the keys to my bank accounts.
They do because their banks are largely not offering anything more fine grained, because they don’t have to, and in fact doing so would cannibalize their debit card business.
Requesting full account access for anything other than maybe budgeting software should just not be legal.
I was repeatedly pressured to hand my bank account logins over to plaid when I bought a house. People always seemed surprised when I refused. Maybe they were just acting that way to pressure me into making their sale process slightly easier, but I got the impression most people just go along with it.
Handing my finances over to a company like that is a hard no for me, I can't imagine ever doing business with someone who required it.
Have you ever entered your routing+account number into HR software for direct deposit? Doesn't that qualify as handing a third party essentially the same access as Plaid gets? I think bank accounts are generally more accessible in the modern era, it's just a risk that you take.
Of course, you're not obligated to use Plaid but I do find the concerns around this quite strange since you're likely exposing account information already.
Hijacking this comment to complain about fintech apps / saas providers requiring Plaid - please stop.
For example, Coinbase requires logging in with Plaid to... setup auto-pay for their credit card statements. No way to just provide account/routing numbers the good ole way.
There's lots of issues with Plaid but one big one is that banks (e.g big ones like BofA) can lock your account due to suspicious login with Plaid.
https://x.com/kanateven/status/1973793740331368841