Finicity vs Stripe Connect: Which is best?

Heron doesn't offer account aggregation but 75% of our customers do leverage account aggregators in order to provide world-class financial services. We are often asked to recommend the best API to get bank transactions, so we want to share the feedback we hear on the different options.

Here we'll be comparing Finicity against Stripe Connect. Both providers are ideal for a US consumer connections use case. However, there are some differences.

The pros of Finicity are:

Good coverage
Second largest player after plaid

However there are some drawbacks:

Consumer focused; not great for SMBs
Keeping connections live is a lot of work

And the benefits of Stripe Connect are:

Uses Finicity and MX under-the-hood which might mean greater coverage
Ease of integration and excellent documentation

But again there are some drawbacks:

Very new so not much feedback on performance
Keeping connections live is a lot of work

No account aggregator has perfect coverage and great connectivity. When selecting your first vendor, it probably makes sense to go for the one with the best coverage for your target population (coverage varies between business and consumer accounts). If all goes well and you end up building a big business you should be ready to build software to:

Ask customers which institutions they want to connect to
Route your customers to different account aggregators based on the institution they select
Have a hierarchy e.g. Finicity, Stripe Connect as a fallback, and Yodlee as a reserve

We specialize in normalizing and deriving insights from raw transaction data pulled from any aggregator. So if you would like tailored recommendations of what provider to choose, book a demo.