July 2017 Summaries

The publication of "The Power of Identity Data" primer aims to explain how secure sharing of identity data between financial services ecosystem participants benefits all parties involved. Leading organizations, including fintech companies and traditional institutions, are already harnessing identity data to make the financial services ecosystem more secure by combining it with data from other sources in a puzzle-piece approach enabled by trusted intermediaries. This approach improves financial ecosystem security, reduces operational costs for banks, and enables innovation for consumers, offering a rare "win-win-win" outcome.

There were 11,652 FDIC-insured institutions and 5,733 NCUA-insured credit unions in the United States as of the most recent data, but some sources estimate nearly 18,000 financial institutions due to M&A activity, institution failures, and changing infrastructure. The number of financial institutions has decreased over the past few decades, with banks reaching their lowest numbers since regulators started tracking metrics and credit unions also seeing a decline. Consolidation and failure have disproportionately reshaped the industry, with more than 10,000 banks leaving the industry between 1984 and 2011. Today, the top 200 institutions hold about 70% of all U.S. depository accounts, but small banks and credit unions remain important for rural areas and other constituencies. To build a comprehensive financial ecosystem, it's essential to account for the legacy infrastructure and technical details that underlie these institutions, as simply building integrations is not enough; consolidation is necessary to provide the best user experience.

We've released customizable copy in Link, allowing users to edit titles, messages, and buttons for the successful connection, reconnection, institution select, and institution search views on both Link web and iOS. These customizations can be made directly from the Dashboard without requiring any integration changes, and will instantly show up in Link. This is just the first step towards making Link more customizable, with future features planned to further enhance user experience.

We've made significant progress in expanding our bank coverage, adding Auth and Identity support for several large institutions. We now support over 1,500 institutions with Auth and more than 300 institutions with Identity. Additionally, we've improved the Link feature by introducing a new exit status, enhanced the Dashboard with two-factor authentication, and started working on improving our support experience to provide faster and more helpful responses.