September 2019 Summaries

Erik Anstine has a dual career as a software engineer at Plaid in New York City and a professional opera singer. He works on the Crawler team, building and maintaining integrations with financial institutions, and solves problems to improve customer experience. In his free time, he enjoys playing video games, singing karaoke, and participating in company social events. Erik's passion for opera began at a young age, and he pursued it as a career after high school, performing in various festivals and opera houses around the world. He has since found a way to balance his two passions by working at Plaid full-time while still pursuing singing opportunities. Despite some burnout, Erik is proud of his decision to transition from full-time singing to software engineering and feels grateful to have found a company that supports both careers.

The Plaid Engineering Interns for Summer 2019 worked on various projects to improve the company's products and services. Lujing, a MIT student, contributed to webhook verification and client-scoped webhooks, gaining experience with JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and system design. Jarrod, a Rice University student, focused on cloudwatch exporter and gRPC mTLS, acquiring skills in AWS and Docker, as well as Go programming. Sarafina, a UC Berkeley student, worked on city and state transaction data pipeline and transactions enhancement machine-learning service, developing her knowledge of microservices and Python machine learning ecosystem. Andrew, an MIT student, implemented link account subtype filtering and credit card liabilities, honing his skills in integration with other teams and product development. Eric, a Brigham Young University student, improved bank integrations performance by investigating and documenting approaches to reduce network latency, acquiring expertise in reverse engineering and security techniques. Owen, a Harvey Mudd student, added production data replay and bank integration rate limits, learning about design challenges and solving problems independently. Jennifer, a MIT student, implemented digital signatures and transactions data enhancement improvements, developing her skills in public-key cryptography and project planning. The interns also participated in Plaiderdays, an internal hackathon where they worked on projects to improve Plaid's products and services, with some teams winning awards or recognition.

Brigit is an app that aims to improve users' financial health by offering budgeting tools, automated alerts, interest-free cash advances, and a centralized view of their money. Many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and often face costly overdraft fees or payday loans when they need small amounts of cash before the next paycheck. Brigit helps users avoid these fees and stay out of debt by tracking their bank account transactions and providing necessary funds if needed, thus freeing up mental bandwidth for more important matters.

Plaid has introduced a new feature to its Liabilities product, allowing developers to access more granular and real-time information about consumer credit card debt. This update provides additional data on terms and payment due dates for credit cards, enabling developers to build better debt management solutions. With this addition, Plaid will return more details about the terms and payment due dates for credit card accounts, helping consumers understand their financial obligations and make informed decisions. Developers can now retrieve real-time information about credit card accounts, including APR type, APR percentage, interest charge amount, balance subject to APR, last payment date and amount, next payment due date, minimum payment amount, and more. This update aims to help borrowers consolidate debt across accounts for more favorable terms and pay down balances faster. Plaid's credit card data will also allow developers to provide a seamless experience for their users by filtering account subtypes in the Link iOS and Web features.

Varo is an online mobile banking company that aims to make premium financial services available to everyone. The company was founded by Colin Walsh in 2015 with the goal of putting customers' interests first while still being profitable. Varo launched its app in July 2017 and has since seen significant growth, including $600 million in transactions through the platform. To further improve user experience, Varo introduced no-fee overdraft protection on overdrafts of up to $50 for eligible users. This move is part of the company's mission to help people get ahead financially and avoid making financial struggles worse by charging fees and being opaque. As a result, Varo needed a way to seamlessly link external bank accounts and other apps and institutions, which led them to partner with Plaid.

Mastercard and Visa have made strategic investments in Plaid, a fintech startup aiming to digitize the banking industry. This move is reminiscent of the digitization that occurred in commerce over the past two decades, where improvements at the network level led to the rise of ecommerce and digital commerce. With this investment, Plaid hopes to accomplish what Mastercard and Visa did earlier, creating a consumer-first financial ecosystem that will improve how people manage their financial lives.

In August 2019, Baker Shogry made several updates and improvements to its platform. They updated asset naming conventions for international support, added over 200 investment institutions, improved student loan object data performance, expanded institutional coverage, enhanced loan status logic, and launched a new process to identify inaccurate account numbers. Additionally, they released LinkKit v1.1.22 for iOS users to improve the account linking flow for non-US financial institutions.

Metal, a cryptocurrency platform, aims to make crypto-enhanced payments accessible to all users by building trust and eliminating barriers to entry. To achieve this, they need to link users' bank accounts securely while protecting them from fraud. They turned to Plaid for a solution, which outperformed the competition on several key metrics. The goal is to make managing finances fun and build a relationship of trust with financial institutions.