May 2018 Summaries

Last summer, Plaid started receiving feedback about duplicate transactions appearing in customers' accounts. The problem was traced back to a race condition in the reconciliation process of their Transactions product. This led to multiple sets of results for the same accounts being processed concurrently. A series of bugs were identified and fixed, including issues with scheduling updates and accessing queues. Lessons learned from this experience include ensuring correctness under concurrency, debugging service pipelines as a whole, considering all pieces when investigating problems, and making checklists for building distributed systems.

Plaid is expanding its financial services platform to Canada, enabling innovation and providing access to the country's largest financial institutions. The launch extends Plaid's API suite to include EFT authentication via Auth endpoint, covering major banks such as Royal Bank of Canada and Scotiabank. Existing customers can now access Canadian institutions by including 'CA' in their countryCodes array during Link initialization, while new customers can sign up for a Plaid account to utilize the platform's services. The expansion aims to support cross-border institutions and facilitate product development specific to Canada or expansion across borders.

Plaid has introduced the ability to set distinct API secrets for different environments, namely Sandbox, Development, and Production, enhancing security and access control across organizations. This new feature allows development teams to have full access to the Sandbox environment without compromising security in other areas. To facilitate a smooth transition, Plaid has automatically duplicated existing API secrets across these three environments. Users are encouraged to sign into the Plaid Dashboard to update their API secrets and leverage this improved security measure.

At Plaid, Joy Zheng is a backend engineer who works on the Core Services team, which focuses on services in the middle of the infrastructure between clients and data sources. She describes Plaid as "super impact-driven" with people who are generous with their time and humble. Joy was drawn to Plaid because it solves a clear problem and aligns with her interests in engineering work. Her exciting aspect is working on various projects, learning what she's most passionate about, and prioritizing effectively. A typical day for Joy involves busy work, open office spaces, and team collaboration. Outside of work, she enjoys baking, cooking, and exploring the farmer's market. Joy participates in Plaid extracurriculars like a Plearning class teaching colleagues to make truffles and running the book club. She is also an avid reader with her own website tracking book statistics and discussing books with her book club. If not a software engineer, she might enjoy baking or working in politics.

Drop is a customer loyalty rewards platform that leverages Plaid's Transactions product for easy access to clean customer data through connected bank and credit cards. This allows Drop to offer personalized rewards based on individual spending habits, consolidating all rewards into one simple-to-use app. The partnership with Plaid has helped Drop achieve rapid organic growth and impressive engagement rates, with a user base of over one million members in just two years.

In April 2018, updates were made to various products and services. The new Assets product was announced, approved by Fannie Mae for Day 1 Certainty™ asset verification. Search experience improvements were implemented in Link Web and iOS, including augmented query matching and popularity-based search result ordering. Additionally, LinkKit 1.1.8 was released with improved password manager support and UI unification between Link Web and iOS. Various institutions experienced upgrades to their user onboarding flow and extended transaction history availability for SunTrust accounts.

Plaiderdays at Plaid is an annual tradition where the entire company comes together to work on side projects that benefit the company in some way. The event kicks off early on a Wednesday morning and lasts through presentations on Friday, culminating in the Honorable Golden Platypus Award for the top prize-winning team. Teams are encouraged to use Plaid's technology to tackle challenges such as helping communities traditionally underserved by the finance industry or democratizing information in student loan markets. The event features events, meals, and surprises throughout the week, including a post-Plaiderdays party with live performances. Many projects from Plaiderdays have shipped since the last iteration, and the company is excited to see what new ideas will emerge from this annual tradition.