Relevant Tangent:
When you try to link two financial accounts (in the US) for the purpose of transferring money from one to the other, and the originating financial institution offers, or in many cases now outright insists you use Plaid (a third party company) to make the connection..
YSK you're giving Plaid permanent access to all of your financial records on the target account. They can immediately download your entire history and go back whenever they want to get an update.
Sometimes they obfuscate that they're even using Plaid, so here's how to tell.
If they "inconveniently" ask for routing and account numbers, and tell you that they're going to make two small deposits into the target account and that you need to watch for those deposits in the next few days and then come back and enter how much those deposits were to verify that it's your account, then that is NOT Plaid. This is the version you want!
If, however, they "conviently" jump to a window for you to log into the target account to instantly make the connection, THAT'S Plaid. Once you enter your login info, you've just given Plaid permission to paw through your account history and come back to rummage for more whenever they'd like.
