June 2019 Summaries

Plaid has welcomed its largest class of Summer 2019 Plinterns, a group of talented individuals from various universities across the US. The Plintern team is excited to be working on projects that will help shape the future of fintech and develop new products for clients. Lujing Cen, Sarafina Smith, Jennifer McCleary, Andrew Chen, Owen Gillespie, Jarrod Dunne, Eric Fortney, and other interns are eager to apply their skills and knowledge to real-world problems. The Plinterns have reported a positive experience so far, with many citing the friendly and supportive team environment as a major draw. They are looking forward to working on projects such as encryption and authentication, data infrastructure at scale, and developing new products for clients. The company is also hosting various events and activities, including an internal hackathon, Plaiderdays, and a company-wide retreat in Mexico. With their unique blend of technical skills and passion for fintech, the Plinterns are poised to make a significant impact at Plaid.

We investigated the repeated ElasticSearch outages at Plaid, which were caused by memory-intensive queries crashing data nodes and bringing down the cluster. The root cause was identified as user-written queries aggregating over a large number of buckets, causing individual counters to take up too much memory on each data node. To address this issue, we configured request memory circuit breakers to cap memory usages for individual queries and limited the number of buckets ElasticSearch would use for aggregations. We also worked with AWS support to update the cluster settings, which allowed us to prevent similar issues in the future.

Plaid has launched a product called Investments, which enables developers, fintech apps, and financial institutions to create a holistic view of their customers' investments, including account balances, holdings, and transactions. The platform provides two endpoints, /investments/holdings/get and /investments/transactions/get, that can be used individually or in tandem to return detailed profiles of holdings and transactions. Investments aims to empower customers with financial data to inform their understanding and decisions about their financial well-being, supporting the growth and scale necessary for today's digital financial services offerings. The product was built to connect investment accounts to Plaid's platform, enabling users to link held-away accounts and providing a more comprehensive net worth view. Plaid has received invaluable feedback from beta users and invites existing customers and new developers to get started with Investments.

Taylor Wilson, a photographer and former television reporter, initially pursued various fields including theater, medicine, and computer science. He eventually landed at Plaid through an interview process that impressed him with the technical challenges and welcoming team culture. At Plaid, he works on building integrations with financial institutions to power apps, and values the company's emphasis on work-life balance, a supportive team, and a family-friendly environment. His eclectic background has allowed him to bring diverse skills and perspectives to his role, making him a strong fit for Plaid.

SoLo Funds partnered with Plaid to improve user experience and increase conversion rates. The platform helps individuals overcome short-term cash flow challenges without relying on predatory financing options like payday loans. By integrating with Plaid, SoLo Funds saw a significant improvement in its conversion rate, nearly doubling from 45% to 77%. This partnership has brought stability to the financially insecure and provided a more efficient way for users to connect their bank accounts.

In May 2019, Plaid made significant updates to its platform. It expanded Transactions, Identity, Auth, Balance, and Assets services to the UK with support for popular banks and neobanks. The company also launched Plaid Direct, an easy-to-use integration spec that allows apps and financial institutions to quickly become supported institutions in the Plaid data network. Other updates include enhancements to /identity/get endpoint, release of API version 2019.05.29 for European institution coverage, LinkKit v1.1.19 with French and Spanish language support, improvements to Sandbox for customized account data testing, and a new system status page at status.plaid.com.