June 2018 Summaries

We built a monitoring system to support over 9,600 bank integrations at Plaid. Our core promise is providing reliable and homogenous data from all financial institutions. We initially struggled with our legacy logging-based monitoring system due to the diversity of institutions and the need for customizability. After determining our requirements, we identified metrics such as success/failure counts, latency spikes, and data quality degradation. The technical requirements included scalability, latency, usability, event transport, time series database, alerting, and visualization. We chose Prometheus and Alertmanager due to their flexibility and scalability. A standard pipeline was built for services that export straightforward metrics, while a custom pipeline was created for services that require more complex metric generation. Our monitoring system has reached 190k+ metrics exported, 700 events per second processed, and 31 engineers have contributed to monitoring configuration changes. We learned the importance of building the end-to-end pipeline first, making components independently usable, tailoring aggregation to narrow areas, using standard components where possible, and investing in developer education.

The fintech industry is reaching an inflection point, driven by the digitization of banking products. This has enabled startups to gain traction by delivering simple digital experiences, but there are still opportunities for innovation in areas such as income smoothing, financial tools for the financially underserved, liquidity for fixed assets, simple tax and estate planning, financial tools for the elderly, consumer-centric loan servicing, micropayments, identity validation solutions, and brokerage-as-a-service. The industry is looking to build on this momentum with a new Request for Startups, which invites companies to submit their ideas and receive support from Plaid.

In May 2018, updates were made to various aspects of Plaid's services. Canadian financial institutions are now supported across all products and developers can enable them through the Dashboard. API versioning was introduced for continuous improvement while maintaining usability for older versions. Distinct API keys by environment were added for Sandbox, Development, and Production environments. Link iOS 1.1.9 was released with visual UI modifications to align with Plaid Link for web. Items can now be created in the sandbox environment directly via the API without using Link. Over 30 new Auth-enabled institutions were added, including Patelco CU, and support for Walmart MoneyCard by Green Dot was implemented. Additionally, several improvements were made to the Plaid support experience in the Dashboard.