1/ Looks like my Plaid tweet and blog post from yesterday tapped into a few different themes that people are actively thinking about:
2/ The Plaid API is eating the physical bank branch: it replaces bank tellers and customer support phone lines with software calls.
3/ There's a future where fintechs are the user layer (trade stocks! pay friends!) while banks are the data layer (actually store and move money, regulated and safe and compliant), as @medriscoll highlights:
@medriscoll 4/ This is terrifying for banks because they lose all the juicy sales opportunities that come with having customers visit them in person, as @patio11 points out:
@medriscoll @patio11 5/ Plaid makes that future more likely by lowering the barrier to entry for fintechs to actually fulfill their customers' tasks.
@medriscoll @patio11 6/ The banks won't like it, but they may not have a choice, per this conversation with @awesomeboris from @Betterment:
@medriscoll @patio11 @awesomeboris @Betterment 7/ Of course the way Plaid currently accomplishes this (login-sharing and screen-scraping) is unsustainable, but that's where Visa comes in.
@medriscoll @patio11 @awesomeboris @Betterment 8/ In a typically astute @stratechery post, @benthompson lays out why banks may choose to partner with Visa to build out actual APIs that eventually replace Plaid's somewhat hacky solution: stratechery.com/2020/visa-plai…
@medriscoll @patio11 @awesomeboris @Betterment @stratechery @benthompson 9/ Early to mid-stage fintechs don’t necessarily want to be banks, while banks aren’t necessarily good at offering the products and services that customers want. Visa+Plaid allows each side to focus on what they're good at, while embedding themselves into each interaction.
@medriscoll @patio11 @awesomeboris @Betterment @stratechery @benthompson 10/ A fascinating illustration of a larger pattern: APIs are eating B2B relationships. More here: abrahamthomas.info/blog/2020/01/1…
