November 2018 Summaries

Online used-automotive dealer Carvana has improved its digital payment process by partnering with Plaid. Prior to 2017, Carvana relied on traditional ACH for clearing down payments, which caused inconveniences for customers and inefficiencies for the company. After researching the fintech market, Carvana selected Plaid for its ease of integration, superior usability, and projected cost savings. This partnership has enabled Carvana to achieve lucrative operational efficiencies, paving the way for a bright future in the used car industry.

Plaid has introduced new features for its Assets product, including transaction insights and account filtering. The Insights feature provides lenders with detailed transaction data such as cleaned transaction strings, locations, merchant names, and categories in a consolidated report. Lenders can now choose to retrieve an Asset Report with transaction data as returned by the bank or cleaned and categorized by Plaid. Additionally, account filtering has been added to simplify and improve the underwriting process. Data refreshes allow lenders to obtain updated account balances and transactions for a borrower. These new features aim to help lenders automate processes and make better credit decisions.

Astra, a smart personal finance tool for goal-oriented professionals, has launched an iOS app that utilizes user-defined rules and automation to simplify financial management. Co-founders Gil Akos and Sam Morgan chose Plaid as their financial data API due to its secure account integration and ability to act as a switching station between accounts based on users' actions. With Plaid, Astra has the technical stability necessary for personal finance innovation.

In October 2018, Baker Shogry and Jesse Dhillon made significant improvements to transactions matching, ensuring consistent transaction IDs from pending to posted status. They also released LinkKit 1.1.13 with enhanced VoiceOver accessibility and other bug fixes. Additionally, they improved support for various banks and credit unions, expanded Synchrony user access, and refined Auth support for Citi accounts by eliminating the need for extra account information during linking. Furthermore, Assets support was added to Quickstart.