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I work for one of the banks listed as supported by Plaid. I am intensely skeptical about the claims they say their API can provide, knowing how our systems work
by jbob2000 8y ago
I work for one of the banks listed as supported by Plaid. I am intensely skeptical about the claims they say their API can provide, knowing how our systems work internally.
Real-time transactions, for one, are not really real-time. There are many things that get in the way of making these real-time and the issues go all the way to the terminal where you swipe your card. Identity is also sketchy. Many people still share bank accounts. It is an unwritten rule that an account !== a person.
I'd be curious to know how they pull this information. There are some APIs available, but we are careful to hand out access. If they're screen scraping, then, well... god help them.
- crabl 8y agoMost applications won't need "real-time" data, so I think things like end-of-day balances and transaction history are enough to cover 90% of the developer use-cases. As far as Identity goes, if you're willing to fork out $500/mo + fees for the production tier, you should be able to afford credit data from Transunion or someone else, which is going to be far more reliable than pulling ID info from bank accounts (for the reasons you stated). I definitely share your concern about how the data gets pulled by Plaid, but as far as I can tell most major banks that have mobile applications have demonstrated that they are at least _marginally_ capable of developing high-availability REST APIs that are reliable enough for purposes like this. I wouldn't be surprised if Plaid somehow managed to get them to agree to using the "mobile app" APIs for their application.