September 2018 Summaries

Plaid has overhauled its brand with a new website featuring a refreshed design system that aims to convey the company's mission of empowering innovators by delivering access to the financial system. The new design system, which was developed after reassessing the existing one, features crisp black and white backgrounds, clean typography, and streamlined geometric shapes. It also incorporates organic brushstrokes and pops of bright colors to convey passion and energy in building faster, better products. The website's design is meant to strike a balance between feeling rigorously structured and approachable, with illustrations that visualize the benefits of having a more open financial ecosystem. This marks a significant milestone for Plaid, which has been growing rapidly since its launch, and demonstrates the company's commitment to maintaining developer experience as a top priority even as it expands.

Shift is a digital marketplace that aims to simplify the peer-to-peer used car market by bringing trust and convenience to its users. The company's first-generation payment collection processes threatened its core principles, prompting it to partner with Plaid to address the issue. Shift employs Balance and Auth to reduce administrative burdens, streamline its user experience, and better convert test drivers into car buyers, ultimately enhancing the overall experience for its customers.

The Data Science & Infrastructure team at Plaid rebuilt their internal analytics around rollup tables and materialized views, using Periscope Data as a business intelligence tool to track metrics around core product usage, go-to-market strategy, and customer support. Initially, query performance was volatile due to the lack of sort and distribution keys in Redshift tables, which impacted data organization on-disk. The team discovered that 95% of slow queries came from just 5% of tables, with a Pareto distribution indicating compounding factors such as large datasets and similar filters. To address this, they pre-computed common elements by creating rollup tables, materialized views, and pre-filtered tables, changing user queries to run against these derivative tables. The operational deployment required cross-team collaboration and setting up dashboards to track individual dashboards and charts contributing slow runtimes. Ultimately, the system stabilized, removing nearly all "unbearably long" queries, with a total migration of 10x more queries, 1/10th the query runtime. The team emphasizes understanding user query patterns, making data tightly-packed through rollup tables, reducing query duplication, and continuously improving processes.

Kevin Hu, a data scientist at Plaid, helps build models that find meaning in data, predicting meanings of aggregate phrases and sentences to help consumers with their finances. He studied applied mathematics at Harvard and was involved in math competitions before joining the finance world. At Plaid, he's drawn to the company's dataset and its potential to democratize finance and make everyone better off. He enjoys working in teams, collaborating with clients to understand their needs, and capturing moments through photography, particularly of animals. In his free time, Hu plays the violin and volunteers at a local animal shelter.

The Plaid Dashboard has been updated with improved usage filtering, visualizations, and more features. The new usage view allows users to visualize item adds and removes over time, as well as a product-by-product breakdown directly below it. Additionally, users can now custom filter these visualizations to a specific date range and environment.

In August 2018, significant updates were made to various features of a system. The number of institutions covered by Identity increased to over 2,100, with mutual Auth+Identity coverage reaching 1,700+ institutions. Support for First Republic Bank and Silicon Valley Bank was improved in terms of Auth, Identity, and Transactions. Additionally, LinkKit 1.1.11 was released, adding support for alphanumeric MFA codes and customizable Consent in Link. Furthermore, account filtering was added to Assets, allowing users to exclude unnecessary accounts from appearing in an Asset Report, thus reducing borrower friction and simplifying the underwriting process.