Very poignant and from the heart! Thank you for sharing. But oh man, when that mosquito was on his cheek, I got so anxious about whether or not he'd slap it away...
As a consumer, I'd welcome some more competition in this space. All of the personal finance aggregation apps I've tried, e.g. Mint, YNAB, Personal Finance, etc. have used Plaid and almost always, I have issues with connecting one or more banks on any given day. Submitting tickets re: connection issues rarely resolves in a timely manner too.
The reason I hate plaid is that they are training people to hand over bank passwords/2fa tokens to 3rd parties. And sometimes there are no alternatives available to the consumer.
What you hate is not really Plaid but banks for not providing APIs. Banking data is too juicy to ignore, so when banks don't provide APIs of course companies will resort to MITMing.
I hate fintech apps for demanding information that's none of their business. I can't make an ACH payment on Paypal without giving them my bank login. It was an arbitrary requirement that Paypal started imposing after using the same account for years, now I simply don't use Paypal. On Cashapp, I can't withdraw via ACH unless I share my bank login(so I have to pay for "instant transfer to debit" instead. Apple Pay is my p2p of choice now because they don't engage in this nonsense, and I only deal with others on the rare occasion that someone can only pay me with one of the aforementioned abusive services.
I would be OK with Plaid if they let you manage what you share with apps via permission management.
For example: If fintech app wants to make sure I have $500 to send to my friend, I should be able to tell Plaid NOT to share my entire transaction history and it should simply give said app a binary "sufficient/insufficient" balance. No institution should get to look through my transaction history without having a damn good reason. No, I won't give companies the benefit of the doubt in our "ask for forgiveness not permission" tech culture. Assume that any information gathered about you will be monetized or used against you.
No, he dislikes the idea of handing login data over, and if your business requires someone else create an API that doesn't exist and they don't want to make, you don't have a business.
The reason they need login info is because thats the only way to get data, and a huge security risk for everyone (users, bank, and the service). Nobody is required to build an API for your financial business so it can work, and building such an api is not a small challenge in highly secure areas of business.
Personally I won't use any service like this that asks me to break my bank's TOS and hand over login information. That's honestly crazy. I'd rather build my own spreadsheets and dashboards.
Not the original commenter, but no... Banks not providing APIs may be a problem, I guess, but the problem that I really care about is a company actively and purposefully regressing the greater security landscape.
Zillow's conclusions seem wildly inaccurate for Boston - it is most definitely a buyer's market. Time to sell has increased drastically across all price ranges. Price cuts are rampant as well. I've seen apartments listing at 1.1m in April finally just sell this month in the low 900s. So take the report with a grain of salt!
I made an offer on a home in Providence this month and it is most definitely a seller's market. Inventory is very low, properties do not last long, and (after watching the market closely all summer) we eventually made an offer substantially above asking.
I see this zillow report inline with what I am seeing in and around DC area. Especially Suburban. Prices are soaring for both new and old homes. Given the mortgage rates are record low, prices are going up. It is definitely seller's market.
Felt very meta reading this article about SEO while the article itself was employing all the SEO strategies - backlinks, infoboxes, etc :P
It was great that the company had already started its SEO pipeline, but what about for companies with no strategy at all? Are there any good tools to help decide which keywords to focus on?
yeah, haha. It's super meta - we're trying to get this article to rank on "SEO case study." It will probably take a while since the domain is pretty new, but we'll get there.
As for which keywords to focus on, our rule of thumb is, find one of your competitors that's winning with their SEO, and borrow their ideas. In most industries, if you combine the keywords from your top 3-5 competitors, your keyword strategy is gonna be pretty comprehensive. As for the "how," just run your competitor's website through SEMrush or Ahrefs, and voila!
Does anyone else get a bit of unexpected joy when they drive through a section of ‘red’ road without any actual traffic? It makes me feel like I saved a bit of time in my life.
