October 2019 Summaries

Current is a financial management platform that aims to cater to the diverse lives and needs of Americans by offering flexible personal checking accounts, faster direct deposits, and a teen banking product without fees. Founded by Stuart Sopp, the company seeks to help people improve their financial situations by providing affordable services for those left behind by traditional banks. To fund new accounts, customers must link another bank account, partnering with Onfido and Plaid to address issues of conversion rates and security.

The Plaid company is launching its third annual Request for Startups (RFS), focusing on student debt management and other areas of financial services. The total US student debt is at an all-time high of $1.6 trillion, with the average outstanding debt being between $20k and $25k. The RFS aims to help improve the lives of student loan borrowers by addressing underserved areas such as debt management tools, automated paydown, lender servicing, debt collections, last-mile remittance, digitizing government benefits, cross-vertical financial infrastructure, and compliance-as-a-service. Plaid is offering resources and connections to selected startups, with a possibility of up to $12k in free usage for new companies.

Wave is a software company that helps micro-businesses grow and succeed by providing accounting, invoicing, payments, and payroll tools on a comprehensive platform. The Toronto-based company aims to make financial management accessible to all small businesses, regardless of their size or budget. Wave's goal is to prevent business failures caused by poor financial management, with over 50% of small businesses in North America failing within their first five years due to lack of understanding about finances. To address this issue, Wave offers many of its products for free and provides a user-friendly platform that allows small business owners to accept payments through both credit card and ACH (bank) methods, making financial transactions easier and more efficient.

In September 2019, Baker Shogry made several updates to their platform. They added support for more UK institutions using Open Banking APIs and expanded historical transaction availability for student loan servicers. The Liabilities endpoint was enhanced to retrieve credit card details from major institutions and supports Synchrony retail cards. Subtype filtering was released in Link iOS and Web, allowing users to view specific types of financial accounts. Sandbox data was updated for more realistic testing purposes. Additionally, over 300 new investment institutions were added, including Canadian banks, and support for multi-currency accounts and Canada-specific account subtypes was implemented. Finally, LinkKit v1.1.23 was released as a changelog update.