October 2018 Summaries

Angela Zhang, an engineering manager at Plaid, joined the company as a software engineer six months prior to her promotion. Her transition to managing a team was smooth, with most of her time spent on supporting engineers and general processes. Angela enjoys working in a supportive environment where everyone has high ownership over systems, making it a fun yet productive workplace. She attributes her interest in Plaid to its product-market fit and hyper growth, offering opportunities for personal career growth. Before joining Plaid, Angela worked at Quora as a software engineer, completing three and half years of work before deciding to pursue further education. She managed to graduate from MIT in just three years by taking multiple classes every semester and working on various projects. In her free time, Angela unwinds with her dog Mack, who she adopted six months prior to joining Plaid, and enjoys activities such as hiking, skiing, and running a breakfast book club with friends.

Zeta, a digital money management tool designed for millennial couples, was founded with the goal of achieving financial agency as a human right. The company partnered with Plaid to modernize and democratize the outdated banking infrastructure, significantly reducing development time and costs. With this partnership, Zeta quickly integrated into the financial ecosystem, providing valuable data insights to its users. Aditi Shekar's vision is for every millennial couple on the platform to benefit from the data it offers, with Plaid playing a crucial role in empowering her customers to achieve their financial goals.

Stilt, a digital lending company supported by Plaid, is providing millions of people with access to credit products in the United States by using alternative indicators of financial responsibility, such as employment status and education, rather than traditional credit scores. This approach helps immigrants and other underserved populations who are often denied loans due to lack of U.S. credit history. By leveraging Plaid's access to applicants' day-to-day financial data, Stilt is able to assess risk more accurately and make loan offers that set individuals up for long-term success in the country.

Plaid, a fintech platform, has partnered with JPMorgan Chase to provide secure data access for its supported applications and services. By using Chase's API, users can safely share their financial data with their preferred fintech apps while maintaining control over authentication and permissioning. This collaboration aims to enhance user experiences, improve data security, and enable developers to innovate more effectively in the fintech ecosystem.

Meet Plaid's Engineering Interns`: The inaugural class of engineering interns at Plaid has successfully completed their projects and returned to school. Four interns from UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, Harvard, and Stanford joined the company with diverse technical interests and worked on various projects across the organization, including data infrastructure, core services, platform, and developer experience. During their internship, they participated in social events, hackathons, and company-wide retreats, and received mentorship from experienced engineers. The interns shared their experiences and insights about working at Plaid, highlighting the company's unique culture, opportunities for growth, and impact on the fintech industry.

Link web and iOS have been updated to improve user experience when connecting accounts by adding 6,300+ new bank logos and colors, displaying bank homepage URLs in search results, and ranking popular banks higher in search results. These improvements aim to increase brand familiarity with users through the use of distinctive logos and colors, making it easier for them to find their respective banks among institutions with similar names.

In September 2018, significant updates were made to improve the functionality and user experience of various financial tools. Identity support was added to approximately 600 more institutions, bringing the total number of supported institutions to over 2,100. Discover Bank received enhancements including Auth and Identity support, longer transaction histories, and more frequent updates. The Walmart Mastercard and Lowe's Visa Rewards Card were also added for support. Additionally, latency was reduced and reliability improved at over 100 institutions. The Link web and iOS features received an upgrade with the addition of 6,300 new bank logos and colors to help users identify their institution more easily. LinkKit 1.1.12 was released, adding support for security code auto-fill on iOS 12 and other improvements. The Asset Report feature saw the introduction of the /asset_report/refresh endpoint, allowing users to create a new report with updated account balances and transactions. The Dashboard received a revamped Usage view, enabling visualization of item adds and removes over time and breaking down usage by product. Lastly, the Quickstart app was updated with added support for more Plaid products and improved printing output of JSON API responses in the Terminal.

At Plaid, diversity and inclusiveness are core values that guide their approach to building a team with varied backgrounds and perspectives. Recently, eight employees from different functions attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for the first time, marking Plaid's formal presence at the conference. During their visit, they met numerous inspiring women, including engineers, and participated in events such as an expo booth, dinner, and reception. One employee, Joy Zheng, gave a tech talk on monitoring complex systems, which was also documented on Plaid's blog. The experience was deemed incredibly enriching, with attendees engaging in fascinating conversations and being inspired by speakers like Anita Hill.