March 2021 Summaries

Dun & Bradstreet, with the help of Plaid, is introducing alternative data into small business credit profiles. This integration allows small businesses to securely share financial account information to create and potentially improve their Dun & Bradstreet credit profile. The incorporation of permissioned bank data could lead to the creation of business credit scores and new analytics. This move aims to help small businesses access more favorable credit terms, win and maintain valuable contracts, and grow based on their own financial reputation.

Ellevest is a financial learning and coaching platform for women founded in 2014 by Wall Street veteran Sallie Krawcheck. Initially focused on shrinking the gender investment gap, the company has since expanded its services to tackle the gender wealth gap with new banking products. However, they faced challenges due to their previous financial data provider making it difficult for members to connect their accounts. To address this issue, Ellevest chose Plaid as a solution, aiming to improve user experience and conversion rates.

Bhargavi Kamakshivalli, a designer at Plaid, drives strategic design and user-centric product development practices for international and financial access teams. She is passionate about building an inclusive financial ecosystem that provides equal opportunity, access, and education to everyone. Kamakshivalli loves working at Plaid due to its supportive culture and talented employees who are aligned with the company's mission of unlocking financial freedom for all. She also appreciates the encouragement to improve existing systems and processes. Prior to joining Plaid, she worked on providing financial access to underbanked populations in India through an impact fund. Kamakshivalli is passionate about academia and currently serves as an associate research director at Parsons School of Design's Visualizing Finance Lab while also teaching occasionally. She enjoys singing with the Navatman Music Collective, an Indian classical music band, to unwind from her high-performance work environment.

Plaid, a financial technology company, undertook an initiative to improve inclusivity in their design system. During their internal hackathon, Plaiderdays, designers focused on the theme of financial inclusion and examined their design elements, particularly color. They realized that none of their illustrations had skin tones, which led them to develop a method for selecting colors inspired by real skin tones from the world around them. The company updated all its illustrations with new skin tones and aims to continue building a more robust and inclusive illustration library in the future.

Plaid has announced the launch of its Accelerate program, an incubator aimed at supporting early-stage fintech startups founded by Black, Indigenous, or People of Color. The program received over 100 applications and offers support from various partners in the ecosystem. The inaugural cohort consists of five startups working on simplifying payments, building wealth, improving access to credit, and enhancing financial wellness for everyone. The Accelerate program will provide mentorship, workshops, networking opportunities, and access to discounted services and credits from network partners.

Stilt provides financial services for immigrants by underwriting loans with cash-flow data, allowing them to access the US financial system. The company initially attempted to build their own functionality but realized that partnering with a connectivity provider like Plaid would be faster, easier, and more secure. By leveraging this partnership, Stilt can access an applicant's financial information and gain a more accurate representation of their ability to repay. This approach enables Stilt to bring more people into the US financial system, providing them with much-needed access to credit and other financial services.

The ElasticSearch (ES) cluster is a critical component of real-time observability at Plaid, but it faces scalability challenges due to high log volume spikes. The team designed safety rails to prevent resource-intensive queries from crashing ES and implemented a solution to protect the cluster from surges in log ingestion volume. They explored two classes of solutions: dropping logs as necessary to ensure volume doesn't exceed a certain threshold (N messages/second) or queuing excess logs to prevent accidental data loss during spikes in log volume. The queueing solution was chosen, which involves establishing a budget per service and only emitting N messages/second to ES, with any remaining messages queued for later processing. This approach has improved the reliability of the ELK stack, allowing engineers to move faster and deploy with more certainty, but also increases the number of Kinesis shards and Logstash pods, requiring additional monitoring and alerting rules.

OneGold, an investment platform for precious metals, was created by APMEX with the goal of making buying gold easier than ever. The company aimed to simplify the payment step, which has historically been a high-friction process due to costly bank wires and delayed payments. To achieve this, OneGold partnered with Plaid to enable customers to quickly and securely connect their financial accounts via ACH payments, reducing errors and increasing convenience for buyers and retailers alike. By leveraging Plaid's technology, OneGold was able to provide a seamless user experience, making it easier for people to own precious metals without the hassle of manual account setup and verification.

Plaid and Codat partner to improve small business lending in the UK by streamlining the loan underwriting process for SMEs through the integration of comprehensive financial data from trusted sources, enabling lenders to better assess creditworthiness and reduce fraud. The partnership aims to address the significant funding gap faced by SMEs in the UK, which is estimated to be around £55B, despite a doubling of loans made to SMEs at over £54 billion in 2020 compared to the previous year.

Outdoorsy, a peer-to-peer marketplace for RV rentals, partnered with payment provider Modern Treasury + Plaid to improve their money movement process. The previous system had long wait times of 3-5 days, frustrating customers and impacting Outdoorsy's technical and customer support teams. This led Outdoorsy to seek an orchestrated solution that could handle the complexity of a peer-to-peer marketplace. With Modern Treasury + Plaid, Outdoorsy aims to provide fast and easy payouts for RV owners, enhancing their overall customer experience.

We're introducing a new returning user experience (RUX) for Plaid Link that aims to provide a faster, higher converting account connection process while maintaining security and transparency. The feature allows users to connect their financial accounts by verifying their identity with a one-time passcode or simply entering their password for previously connected institutions. This experience has shown promising results during testing, resulting in a 3% lift in conversion on average. To implement RUX, developers need to upgrade to Link Tokens and verify users' phone numbers via OTP prior to the user entering the Link flow. The feature includes tokenization and encryption to prevent abuse and keep data secure.

SaverLife is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 with a mission to help people save money. The term "savings problem" doesn't express the gravity of the situation, given that just 39% of Americans can comfortably cover an unexpected expense of $400. Living paycheck-to-paycheck has become increasingly common, making it impossible for some individuals to save money. To address this issue, SaverLife uses prizes and incentives to encourage its 460,000 members to change their savings habits. The organization relies on access to consumer-permissioned financial data, which they obtained through a partnership with Plaid. This partnership enables SaverLife to provide personalized services to its members, helping them gain better control over their financial future.

Plaid has introduced a new product called Plaid Income, which aims to make it easier and faster for individuals to verify their income. This is achieved through a consumer-permissioned payroll data platform that allows users to share their payroll information directly with lenders. The platform supports real-time payroll authentication for over 250,000 employers in the US, including nearly 80% of the Fortune 100 companies. Plaid Income offers two ways for users to share their income: by connecting their employer or payroll provider account, or by uploading payroll documents. This solution is designed to improve the lending experience for borrowers and lenders alike, reducing paperwork and closing times while increasing efficiency and accuracy. The platform has already received positive feedback from beta partners in the fintech industry, with companies such as Veterans United Home Loans and Carputty using it to streamline their onboarding processes.

In this month's newsletter, Plaid highlights its latest tools and updates, including better visibility into institution health, new integrations with financial institutions, and improvements to its Investments product. The company also introduces a new Item Debugger in the Dashboard, allowing users to have a comprehensive view of Plaid Items in one place. Additionally, Plaid releases an Open API spec and client libraries, enabling developers to start working with Plaid in 40+ languages. The newsletter also announces upcoming virtual events, including a women in fintech roundtable and Plaid Workshops, as well as a series of community town halls and tech talks. Furthermore, the company shares updates on its customer engagement, including significant gains in engagement for Steady app users who link their financial accounts with Plaid.

Steady boosts income for job seekersChris LuckeOne thing unites the more than 2.5 million Americans who use Steady: income uncertainty.Today, one in ten workers rely on gig work for their primary income and countless more to supplement their primary incomes. But for a majority of these workers, uncertainty can lead to financial hardship. In fact, 78% of Steady members report having struggled to cover a $500 emergency prior to becoming a member.Steady aims to help hourly and gig workers find new income streams and manage their earnings to avoid making unhealthy financial decisions, such as taking on a predatory loan. To achieve this, Steady uses members’ permissioned financial data to make personalized job recommendations and suggest finance tips.To access that data, Steady uses Plaid.Read the study