I just went through the Plaid payment experience and here is what to expect.
- From your Tesla account page there is a new button that says Add Bank Account and Make Payment
- This pops up a Plaid dialog box that says that the account information will be saved for future Tesla payments which is a bit unnerving
- Next is a selection of 8 major banks logos/icons and a field to enter any bank that isn't one of those listed
- Once you have selected your bank, you get a Username and Password dialog
- After entering those it then prompted to select a two factor authentication method (SMS, phone, email), so it must have logged into my bank and received that page and is passing along the info to me
- After getting the SMS from my bank (which includes the DO NOT SHARE warning) and entering it in to the Plaid dialog it showed my accounts with balances
- Select the account that you want to pay from and hit continue
- The dialog box then asks for the "routing account number". This was confusing that it didn't say "bank routing number" and that it didn't automatically get this from the account access that it had or through a partner bank API.
- Next it asks for the actual account number, see prior comment about account access
- Then a second confirmation of the account number
- And then it is abruptly done with no final confirmation to authorize the payment just that it will be withdrawn in 3-5 days. This was quite a shock to me when it happened, but based on that recent "Tesla owner butt-dialed $4,280 autopilot upgrade" news story seems to be the way that Tesla operates with payments.
I went through this twice. This first time an account transfer from my HYSA to my bank checking account was still in progress, but I thought I would just be setting up the account info for use later. It actually let me do 8, 9 and 10 and then in 11 it said that I had insufficient funds and error'ed out. It should have done that right after step 7. Also, none of my information was stored and I had to go through everything again after the account transfer went through.
BTW, turns out I probably could have done this with my HYSA as it was a bank option in Plaid. I didn't think that this was possible as the HYSA FAQs on ACH transfers say that it is only possible to transfer from/to my own accounts. I considered that a security feature to prevent unauthorized transfers, but now I'm not too sure.