June 2020 Summaries

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of finance, with fintech companies playing a significant role in government stimulus programs and providing access to loans and cash management services. Updated financial inclusion rules are driving banks to adopt more technology to serve underserved markets, creating opportunities for fintech companies to provide digital reach and scalability. Meanwhile, workplaces are becoming financial wellness hubs for employees, with policy changes allowing small employers to band together to offer joint retirement plans and providing new market opportunities for fintech to reach non-traditional workers with targeted financial solutions.

Open finance is a natural next step after PSD2 and Open Banking, which gave consumers control over their payment account data. The goal of open finance is to provide consumers with full control over all their financial data, underpinned by regulation and enabled by technology. Regulators, policymakers, and innovators are exploring how to achieve this, considering global approaches and wider impact. A successful open finance regime could transform an abundance of products and services across financial services and beyond, making mortgage approvals instantaneous and digital, pension switching automatic, and financial advice more personalized and powerful. With open finance, people and small businesses gain control over their data and receive better, more affordable services in return.

Plaid, a financial services technology provider, migrated its website from Handlebars to React in 12 weeks using an automated tool that allowed incremental migration while maintaining regular feature work and maintenance. The company's rapid expansion demanded faster iterations, more experimentation, and localized content. The legacy website was built with the Handlebars templating language and flat file generator for compiling to static HTML, which made maintenance arduous and prevented optimal serving of market-specific content. By migrating to Next.js, Plaid achieved a fully extensible, zero configuration, production ready framework that allowed the team to hit the ground running. The migration process involved building a compiler to handle most of the migration for them and manually migrating only a small number of complex pages.

In May 2020, Baker Shogry released several updates to their platform. They launched Plaid Exchange, an open finance platform that allows financial institutions to build data access strategies and improve user accessibility. Additionally, improvements were made to the Auth product, increasing conversion rates for micro-deposit flows. The Status Dashboard now lets users customize the displayed institutions, while new versions of Link SDKs on iOS and Android were released with bug fixes.