April 2016 Summaries

Plaid has been named a Cool Vendor in financial services by Gartner, highlighting its focus on empowering consumers and developers through its platform. The company's technology makes bank data more useful and democratizes access to this data across practically every U.S. bank, addressing security and privacy concerns. Plaid's developer-friendly approach enables the creation of new and better services, with the goal of lowering barriers to entry for developers and promoting credential-based logins.

Plaid's codebase has evolved significantly since 2013, with a shift away from imperative JavaScript and towards more functional programming approaches. The team initially used Underscore.js for its benefits in avoiding loops and improving type safety, but still struggled with type errors due to inconsistent data. To address this, they developed Sanctuary, a library of safe versions of unsafe Ramda functions, which provides a way to write terse and declarative programs that work correctly for all inputs using the Maybe data type. The team's adoption of functional programming has improved their codebase's overall quality and maintainability.

We faced a significant issue with npm install speed in our virtual environment, specifically when using VirtualBox. Our initial investigation revealed some quick wins to improve performance, but installing packages still took a long time. We explored alternative package managers like ied and freight, but ultimately built our own solution called npmserve, which offloads installs to a remote server, significantly improving build times by leveraging caching and reducing the load on the development environment.

The OFX 2.2 update aims to bridge existing infrastructure with changing consumer needs by strengthening security and enabling reliable data exchange. The specification now supports token-based authentication models, which are expected to become the standard in bank authentication. This update is part of a broader effort to modernize the financial system and empower consumers and developers alike. The OFX Consortium, of which Plaid is a member, has taken steps to align this standard with more contemporary authentication mechanisms, building on previous efforts such as Plaid Link and its partnership with Stripe. By working with competing standards, the consortium seeks to ensure that any changes in the financial system prioritize consumer empowerment and innovation.