Plaid vs. Premier Bank Platform

Plaid is extremely well suited to be your payment API if you're a start-up looking to scale your banking connections fast and securely. Their API is fully functional upon integration. Most end-users have encountered Plaid before so it's a trusted platform for many consumers so even if you're a new app, users feel comfortable connecting their bank through Plaid.

Incentivized

Premier Bank Platform is well suited for a banking environment, it wouldn't really make sense to use it in any other kind of environment. We are a medium sized bank who outsources Platform and it suits us fairly well. They are some issues with Fiserv from time to time but overall Platform allows us to complete our banking duties quickly and with relative ease. Fiserv takes care of updating all aspects of Platform for us so from an IT perspective it saves us a lot of headaches. Most end users are satisfied with Platform, the only grumbling you'll typically hear about is when the service is unavailable.

Incentivized

• Plaid connects with 100s of US consumer banks.
• Plaid continuously updates its software to meet the requirements of individual banks.
• Plaid can get your company's payment processing up and running faster than traditional methods.

Incentivized

• Because the Premier Bank Platform is developed by Fiserv, a very large company, there are considerable resources to continue to develop Premier and roll out new solutions.
• It holds most all of our customer data in one central location and transfers that data to other Fiserv apps fairly well.
• It is fairly intuitive and most users pick up on it quickly.

Incentivized

• Consumer feedback or troubleshooting typically comes back to us because Plaid doesn't have an easy way of re-routing support once a user encounters a problem.
• Update timelines could be clearer when they are working on updating a connection with a certain bank.
• The search functionality for the user to find their bank could be a little more robust.

Incentivized

• The software itself is currently a bit dated, but it will be overhauled here sometime in 2019.
• We outsource the platform and sometime the connections to Fiserv are not reliable which cause the platform to be unusable.
• Fiserv has several different platforms and Premier seems to be the most dated of the bunch, again that appears to be changing in 2019 but in the interim it still remains an issue
• The customer support can sometimes be lacking when facing issues with the platform, they will tell you they'll fix it later but give no time frames as to when that might be.

Incentivized

• Plaid got us up and running with most US-based and even some international banks with minimal engineering effort.

Incentivized

• Platform is absolutely critical to our daily bank operations. It's a bit on the expensive side to setup and maintain but in the end worth the money because of the complete coverage it provides in daily business functions.
• There are several competitors to Platform but Premier is what our bank has used for many years, even before it's Fiserv acquisition, and what many employees are comfortable with. A switch would involve a massive investment in retraining.
• A negative impact can be on when there are outages or mishaps on Fiserv's side. Fiserv has a tendency to not compensate you even when they should be obligated to. They seem to play the outlast you game where they hope you will give up and stop asking.

Incentivized