Co-founder of Plaid[1] here. We build an API for developers to connect to their users bank accounts. All the 'startup-y Mints' are our clients.

[1] - https://plaid.com/

This API looks really shiny and well documented, kudos!

Do you only screen scrape or have backend/backoffice/negotiated integrations with various banks? How do you deal with enduser bank credential storage (both technically and legally when dealing with bank ToS)?

Also, in your experience, have any standards like OFX actually achieved critical mass for adoption amongst banks, and has that made your team's lives any easier?

Thanks for the kind words :)

For the top 14 banks we work closely with the banks to build connections - however for the smaller and mid-size banks we work and connect with a variety of vendors that serve those banks.

I personally sit on the OFX consortium (and a couple other financial standards committees) and I'm not overly bullish. I'll just leave this link here.... https://xkcd.com/927/

That XKCD strip is very true for financial standards. :(

I think you missed a question (unless it was intentional :), but how do you deal with enduser bank credential storage (both technically and legally when dealing with bank ToS)?

For example, on the technical side, do you store the credentials themselves or just session tokens/cookies?

As ancient engineering wisdom says: 'The nice thing about standards is that we have so many of them'.

I believe some of the data aggregation is done by reverse engineering APIs of mobile banking apps. You can easily do that by setting up MITM proxy to intercept requests. In some cases, you may need to decompile app binaries to decipher password encryption algorithms.

Congratulations on the WSJ && HN feature. Great API, we use it in our product.

Awesome job btw. I love the site redesign, but it has always been quite good aesthetically. If I could hijack this comment briefly, I would like to ask how you see yourself vs. Stripe, who has a lot of advantages in the payments information space, having their own payment infrastructure and the banks recently fighting aggragators including yodlee.

They're an awesome client of ours! We also partnered with them on their ACH product[1].

[1] - https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-and-stripe/

Why is are the windows in the top banner moving? It is kind of trippy.

What countries do you have support for?

I'm working for a Canadian fintech startup that would truly benefit from a service like yours.

We're focusing on the US market right now - we'll definitely reach out when we move into the international markets. Stay tuned :)

Thanks.

I will definitely keep a close eye on your service. Here's hoping it comes soon to non-US bank accounts.

More like a startup-y Yodlee since it's mainly back-end. Mint was initially primarily a front-end service that later made it's back-end available.