dakev's comments

What's the alternative? 95% of banks in the US don't have a dedicated API. If there was no screen scraping whatsoever in the industry, then the fintech market would be much smaller. Any fintech company whose product is centered their users' financial information (and that's most of them) would see their potential customer base, and thus growth potential, sliced in half. On the consumer side of it, if you're Susan and you bank with Northeast Minnesota's Credit Union for Educators, then without screen scraping you are essentially cut off from being able to use the majority of fintech applications out there.

Screen scraping is a terrible compromise for sure, but without it, fintech, and the everyday consumer's ability to more effectively engage with their finances, would be severely neutered. One day, we'll have a rich financial ecosystem where financial institutions, fintechs, and consumers all talk with eachother exclusively through secure, reliable APIs, but until then, the only other alternative is to cripple this entire industry. Or have Congress pass a sweeping PSD2-esque bill, but good luck with that lol

I'm confused here. So from my understanding, Stripe plugs into the APIs of banks who already have them (like every other aggregator), then relies on existing aggregators for the 95% of banks who don't. In addition, your pricing is "in line" with "the market".

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?

I agree that building in-house integrations is superior to relying on a 3rd party - it's always better for the end user when their sensitive information doesn't have to jump between multiple companies. However, by their own admission (https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-is-the-relationshi...), Stripe did not build any scraping integrations in-house. They in fact, do rely on third parties.

According to one of their PMs, Edwin, elsewhere in this thread, they supposedly integrate directly with banks that already have existing APIs - but for the 95% of banks that don't, it appears this product is just a wrapper for existing aggregators MX and Fincity.