> From the start they’ve been more about working against than working with banks... At the very beginning sure, but very quickly Plaid built out a team to try a

> From the start they’ve been more about working against than working with banks... At the very beginning sure, but very quickly Plaid built out a team to try and work with banks. Banks were the biggest roadblock to OAuth, most banks have (had) zero appetite to provide a good experience for users to delegate programmatic access to their own user data. Banks see user financial data as their own and _not_ belonging to their users (as it legally does). However Plaid has made in-roads at many large institutions, and now supports OAuth, or OAuth-like, access at all (nearly all?) major US financial institutions. Plaid never liked working against banks, that just made everything worse for everybody involved. > My credit union doesn’t have a path to online banking without per-session MFA. This obviously kills async products at Plaid, like continuous transaction data, but doesn't block sync products like Auth (account and routing data). In fact, Plaid made a huge push to increase the amount of MFA encountered on their platform. When banks or credit unions didn't offer MFA, or didn't allow users to enforce MFA on every login, Plaid would attempt to force it through a variety of mechanisms to ensure a bad actor would encounter MFA on Plaid even if the bank would otherwise let them through their actual website.