August 2019 Summaries

Emily Downs is an HR Business Partner at Plaid, responsible for ensuring the effective functioning of GTM and Ops functions. She recently built out Plaid's HR team by hiring high performers and adopting a relatively hands-off managerial style. Since starting at Plaid, she has made significant adjustments to its onboarding process, immigration program, and health insurance plan. Despite the constant busyness and learning curve, Emily enjoys working for Plaid due to its passionate and engaged employees who are always willing to help out and learn from each other. She is passionate about access to good public education and the environment, and she believes in continuous learning and personal growth.

We reduced deployment times for our bank integration service from over 30 minutes to 1.5 minutes by implementing a custom "fast deployments" mechanism that utilizes the node require cache to "hot reload" application code at runtime, allowing us to bypass the latency present in ECS deploys and fine-tune our entire deployment process. This approach enabled us to ship features and bug fixes more quickly, minimize engineering time wasted on context switching and monitoring dashboards, and increase the velocity of Plaid's integrations work.

Qapital is a personal finance app that helps its members find their path to money happiness by offering FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts, as well as behavioral psychology-rooted savings tools. The goal is for members to spend confidently on things they love while achieving their financial goals. With Plaid's API, Qapital consistently connects to members' bank accounts, protecting them from NSF/overdraft fees. As a result, its 1.7 million members have saved an average of $5,000 per year, totaling over $1 billion in savings.

In July 2019, Baker Shogry introduced several updates and improvements to their platform. They launched Liabilities, allowing developers access to standardized student loan details from major U.S. servicers. Upgrades were made to 25 banks, credit unions, and credit card issuers, providing longer transaction histories and expanded Auth and Identity coverage. Additionally, LinkKit 1.1.21 was released with a bug fix for the account select flow.