July 2019 Summaries

Plaid is a financial technology company that has grown significantly since its early days, expanding from a small team in San Francisco to multiple offices around the world. Charley Ma, one of the company's leaders, joined Plaid as part of its initial hires and initially worked on various aspects of the business before focusing on sales and later returning to the Growth team to manage the New York office. The Growth team is responsible for launching, retaining, and growing customer relationships, which allows Charley to witness firsthand the growth and progress of fintech companies and products. Despite the company's rapid expansion, Charley faces challenges in maintaining communication and processes between teams as Plaid grows globally. He attributes his success to his ability to learn from diverse experiences, including a stint at JP Morgan, where he developed a strong understanding of large financial institutions and learned valuable skills that have served him well in his current role. Overall, Charley's experience reflects the company's commitment to creating a strong culture and empowering its employees to drive growth and innovation.

Introducing Liabilities to help you build better debt management solutions` Fintech has made managing money easier but innovation has lagged behind in debt management, a critical piece of financial health. U.S. consumer debt reached record highs at the end of 2018 with student loan debt being the second largest category behind mortgages. The new Liabilities endpoint will provide real-time information about users' financial liabilities starting with student loan debt and expanding to other categories over time. With access to this data, fintech developers can help borrowers understand, engage with, and manage their debt by surfacing repayment opportunities, debt forgiveness programs, consolidation, or refinancing options. The Liabilities endpoint provides standardized data across major U.S. servicers and is being used by early beta tester Pillar to provide personalized student loan repayment recommendations and facilitate payments.

In June 2019, Plaid introduced Investments, allowing developers to create a comprehensive view of their customers' investments across over 140 institutions in the US. The /investments/holdings/get endpoint returns detailed account holdings information, while /investments/transactions/get provides insights into transactions such as buys, sells, and dividends. Institution status updates now include success rates of Transactions updates from an institution. A new system status page was also released at status.plaid.com to display the uptime of Plaid's three API environments. Additionally, several institutions were upgraded for expanded product coverage and improved latency, while support for Canadian banks National Bank of Canada, Manulife Bank, and Canadian Tire Bank was added.

Prosper is a peer-to-peer lending marketplace in the United States that aims to enhance financial wellbeing by providing affordable credit for borrowers and investment opportunities for investors in consumer credit asset class. To improve its onboarding process, Prosper partnered with Plaid, which resulted in an 80% success rate for customers connecting their bank accounts.