Stripe Connect vs MX: 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 Stripe Connect against MX. Stripe Connect is best for US consumer connections, while MX is stronger for connections for the banks they cover. Here are the key differences.

The pros of Stripe Connect are:

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

However there are some drawbacks:

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

And the benefits of MX are:

Great coverage

But again there are some drawbacks:

More expensive than some of the other options
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. Stripe Connect, MX 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.