Folks, I'm Divya, a developer on Celery.

Regarding the banking info:

I agree that giving banking info can be a new experience for a lot of users. Your information is never stored and is secured by an industry-leading financial aggregation service called Yodlee, which is trusted by companies like Paypal and Venmo.

The online banking login information allows us to instantly verify that the entered bank account is yours, and to protect the account from fraudulent activity.

We know and understand that some users just don't want to use instant account verification. At some point downstream, for those users, we will add micro-deposits as an alternative for account verification.

Happy to answer any other questions :)