February 2021 Summaries

Daniel LaCoste is a Developer Support Engineer at Plaid, where he helps developers build with the Plaid API by answering product questions and troubleshooting integrations. He loves working at Plaid for its talented team members and unique culture that encourages growth and learning. Daniel's passion for technology began in his childhood through video games, which led him to study computer science. As a "culture ambassador" at Plaid, he has helped maintain the company's strong sense of community as it has grown.

The concepts of authorisation and authentication under PSD2 are legally captured by access and consent, but only work as intended when a consumer first connects their payment account to a Third Party Provider. The 90-day "reauthentication" requirement is problematic because it conflates reauthorisation with reauthentication, involving financial institutions in a way that harms consumers and the ecosystem. A new proposal by the FCA aims to remove this requirement and replace it with 90-day reauthorisation, which would benefit TPPs and ensure open banking works as intended for all parties involved.

Obligo is a platform that eliminates the need for security deposits by establishing a secure billing authorization between landlords and tenants, allowing them to screen renters based on their financial situation. By analyzing payment information, Obligo can identify renters who are likely to default on their billing authorization, reducing the risk of damage or non-payment. The company has established partnerships with property managers across the US, managing over 200,000 units, and launched in New York in 2018. To screen renters, Obligo requests two forms of payment, typically a credit card and a bank account, which are then analyzed to assess the renter's financial situation.

The next decade of fintech is expected to build on the unprecedented consumer behavior change and growth seen in 2020, with Plaid hosting its first Community Town Hall event to discuss the future of fintech and share platform news. The company's core platform priorities include improving product quality and delivering best-in-class experiences to end-users, while also enhancing data access strategy through partnerships with financial institutions. Additionally, Plaid aims to minimize ecosystem risk and maximize trust by prioritizing consumer transparency and control in policy discussions and API solutions. The event provided an opportunity for developers and entrepreneurs to share feedback and engage with the community, with upcoming workshops scheduled for March.

Approve Owl is an AI-based solution designed to streamline loan application processes for car dealerships, particularly in the subprime space. By enabling buyers to complete applications and submit documentation online, it helps reduce paperwork and speeds up financing decisions. The platform also verifies income information, which often causes delays or even deal failures. Approve Owl uses Plaid's secure data sharing technology to help customers grant permission for financial data access. This solution not only improves the customer experience but also allows salespeople more time to focus on selling.

Introducing the Item Debugger, a new troubleshooting workflow in Plaid's Dashboard that provides comprehensive insights into user financial institution data, errors, and recommended actions to resolve issues. Improvements have also been made to Institution Status to provide real-time views of Plaid's connection with financial institutions, including a watchlist feature, backend changes, and product granularity enhancements. These updates aim to make it easier for developers to troubleshoot user connection issues and improve their overall experience.

We're releasing a Plaid OpenAPI file that allows you to auto-generate client libraries in over 40 programming languages, expanding our coverage from just a handful of popular languages. This enables easy access to tools for building with Plaid, regardless of the language used, and simplifies updates to our client libraries. The new OpenAPI specification supports official client libraries in Ruby, Node, Python, Java, and Go, as well as auto-generated libraries, which will automatically support new features released by Plaid.

Plaid Engineering has released its 2020 State of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging report, detailing the company's progress on these fronts. The report highlights improvements in gender diversity within engineering management and overall retention rates for women engineers. However, there is still work to be done in terms of underrepresented groups (URG) representation and fostering a sense of belonging. Plaid has implemented various initiatives such as org-wide transparency, recruiting funnel diversity, inclusion meeting training, community building, and product inclusion principles to improve DEIB at the company. For 2021, Plaid plans to continue these efforts while focusing on increasing women and URG representation in experienced IC positions and addressing any remaining gaps in fostering a sense of belonging.

Atom Bank, a digital-only bank, has partnered with Plaid to streamline the application process for business loans and offer near real-time lending decisions to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The collaboration leverages Open Banking data, enabling Atom to anticipate SME financing needs and deliver smart lending products. This partnership aims to alleviate challenges faced by SMEs, such as low productivity, high failure rates, and inefficient access to credit, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We've created a new documentation platform that reflects our dedication to providing an excellent developer experience. The new docs site is maintainable, scalable, and discoverable, with comprehensive content that's easy for developers to use. We gathered feedback from internal dogfooding, public beta users, in-app feedback, and user research to improve the site. We learned that users don't see things the way we do, and that UX problems can be disguised as other issues. We addressed these problems by adding features like search discoverability, improving content organization, and providing more self-serve documentation. Our goal is to continue improving the docs experience with features like better exposure of relevant information, more live demos and code, and additional support for non-developer users.

Plaid has been actively engaging with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to promote consumer control of their data in the fintech industry. The company, along with its stakeholders, including fintech companies and financial institutions, submitted a comment letter to the CFPB's Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Consumer Access to Financial Records. In this letter, Plaid emphasized the importance of enforcing consumer rights to authorized data access, supervising data aggregators, avoiding mandates on technologies, monitoring practices for competitive incentives, and assessing ecosystem readiness. The goal is to create a framework that enables consumers to take control of their financial data while allowing innovators to build upon the promise of fintech.

Plaid has announced its first Community Town Hall for 2021, where leaders will share updates on platform and product enhancements. The company has also introduced a new Deposit Switch product, allowing users to easily switch their direct deposits to the Plaid app. Additionally, Link tokens are now recommended as the preferred method of integrating with Plaid's Link platform. Plaid is hosting virtual events, including a webinar on building an Open Finance Strategy and a Tech Talk with LendingTree. The company has also launched Accelerate, a nine-month program supporting early-stage BIPOC founders in launching their businesses. Furthermore, Plaid has helped Outdoorsy reduce user error rates by 99% after integrating its platform.