Seems like a shiny repackaging of Finicity/MX.com with little value added. I don't see any reason to recommend this product to anyone. Or maybe they're targeting a different market. This solves exactly none of the issues I've had working with almost every bank aggregation API on the planet (Yodlee, Plaid, Finicity, Tink, Nordigen, Belvo). And boy, do they have issues.
As the founder at [name-redacted] (personal/SMB finance plugin), I deal with bank connection issues on a daily basis.
- Screen scraping is 1. flaky and 2. insecure because it requires saving credentials and is 3. not realtime and 4. doesn't work with 2FA. Account balances can be out of date within minutes, and cannot be refreshed without another auth
- 95% of banks on the planet don't have OAuth APIs. The 5% that do have APIs that often don't serve customer needs because they provide the absolute minimum amount of data to meet the requirement. For example CapitalOne's API only provides access to 90 days of data. American Express does not provide access to invoice metadata, which makes reconciliation hard. Who can provide dedicated direct screen-scraping connections to banks with all the data that users want?
- When building a generic fintech product (as I do), global bank coverage is essential. The least bit of innovation Stripe could have done was save me the trouble of having to integrate 5 different APIs to get access to US, European, Latin American and Australian banks.
- In the same vein, connection to 90% of accounts is useless for many users if they can't access the other 10%. The number one need for financial planning software is "to see all my accounts in one place". Most people have at least one account with some obscure institution or overseas bank. If they can't see all their accounts in one place, this isn't solving the problem.
- This is just an API without a GUI dashboard. Another common complaint I've heard from my leads that Plaid/Finicity is only for programmers, or companies that have programming expertise. What if you're a marketing firm with need for no-code bank data visibility?
- Only 180 days of transaction data and no statements? This is much worse than Plaid and Finicity.
I guess it's nice if you can verify ACH details faster, but even then the coverage is worse than Plaid, and so I don't see any reason to recommend this product to anyone. Zero innovation and objectively worse than the current offering? Who is the target market here?
As the founder at [name-redacted] (personal/SMB finance plugin), I deal with bank connection issues on a daily basis.
- Screen scraping is 1. flaky and 2. insecure because it requires saving credentials and is 3. not realtime and 4. doesn't work with 2FA. Account balances can be out of date within minutes, and cannot be refreshed without another auth
- 95% of banks on the planet don't have OAuth APIs. The 5% that do have APIs that often don't serve customer needs because they provide the absolute minimum amount of data to meet the requirement. For example CapitalOne's API only provides access to 90 days of data. American Express does not provide access to invoice metadata, which makes reconciliation hard. Who can provide dedicated direct screen-scraping connections to banks with all the data that users want?
- When building a generic fintech product (as I do), global bank coverage is essential. The least bit of innovation Stripe could have done was save me the trouble of having to integrate 5 different APIs to get access to US, European, Latin American and Australian banks.
- In the same vein, connection to 90% of accounts is useless for many users if they can't access the other 10%. The number one need for financial planning software is "to see all my accounts in one place". Most people have at least one account with some obscure institution or overseas bank. If they can't see all their accounts in one place, this isn't solving the problem.
- This is just an API without a GUI dashboard. Another common complaint I've heard from my leads that Plaid/Finicity is only for programmers, or companies that have programming expertise. What if you're a marketing firm with need for no-code bank data visibility?
- Only 180 days of transaction data and no statements? This is much worse than Plaid and Finicity.
I guess it's nice if you can verify ACH details faster, but even then the coverage is worse than Plaid, and so I don't see any reason to recommend this product to anyone. Zero innovation and objectively worse than the current offering? Who is the target market here?