September 2021 Summaries

As a Sales Leader at Plaid, Matt McGowan is responsible for managing teams that provide exceptional service to West Coast customers. He leads the Startup and Mid-Market segments, focusing on businesses with 1-5 employees who are often new to market or pre-launch. McGowan's work impacts people's financial lives by working with companies that create unique services addressing unmet needs for consumers and businesses, such as financial management and small business loans. Plaid's mission to unlock financial freedom resonates with him, as it enables choices and has enabled numerous business models that weren't previously available. Despite the high-performance environment at Plaid, McGowan values the company culture, citing his consistent appreciation for smart and friendly people. He attributes Plaid's success to its rigorous approach and emphasis on acting with urgency, principles he has adopted in his own career. McGowan's journey into sales began as a History major who landed a job selling companies on putting their open jobs on the internet, a role that helped him develop fundamental skills for selling. He learned about Plaid through a seed-stage startup looking to automate payment validation and was drawn to its early stage and fintech focus. After applying through LinkedIn, McGowan joined Plaid four years ago and has since evolved his role from individual contributor to managing a team. Outside of work, he unwinds with family time, playing the drums, and enjoying wine. McGowan is proud of being a father to two young children, who inspire him with their fearlessness and spirit.

The digital finance ecosystem is facing a critical moment to prioritize consumer privacy, with hundreds of millions relying on digital services. Plaid's mission-driven approach to consumer privacy has drawn the author, Sheila Jambekar, who joins as Chief Privacy Officer. Plaid's products and practices are putting privacy at the forefront, helping consumers understand and control their data sharing, and committing to good data stewardship to protect trust. The road ahead will include complex challenges, but Plaid's consumer-permissioned approach provides a strong foundation to address these issues, with a proactive approach to evolving regulatory expectations. Sheila aims to partner with stakeholders to drive the industry forward, guided by the core belief that consumers have a right to their data and control over it.

Unbanked has bridged the gap between traditional banking and blockchain technology by offering a suite of crypto-enabled financial products, empowering anyone to benefit from blockchain technology. The company previously relied on microdeposits but now uses Plaid to enable faster, safer, and easier linking of outside financial accounts, allowing customers to start transacting in crypto. Unbanked aims to simplify how consumers transmit value, whether it be locally or globally, by providing a modern user experience that is accessible to both tech-savvy individuals and those who may not be familiar with blockchain technology.

Plaid and Q2 announce a strategic partnership to provide better digital banking capabilities to hundreds of banks and credit unions. The partnership aims to deliver the best digital banking experience by integrating Plaid's Exchange platform into Q2, giving customers secure and reliable API-based access to thousands of fintech apps. This integration comes at no cost to Q2 customers, who will also gain access to tools needed to build digital experiences that meet customer expectations. The partnership enables financial institutions to provide their customers with fast and easy digital account funding experiences, reducing the need for microdeposits and enhancing overall banking capabilities.

Plaid has introduced a new virtual conference called Plaid Forum, which brings together developers, innovators, business leaders, and partners to share their work on improving digital financial services. The two-day event will cover topics such as building trust with customers, unlocking new use cases, and expanding into new markets. It will also feature demos, workshops, and fireside chats on various subjects like UX design in fintech, app security, and the future of open finance. Registration for Plaid Forum is now open and free for everyone. The conference aims to foster a community where attendees can share ideas, provide feedback, and shape the future of digital financial services together.

Stephen Jayakar, an engineer on Plaid's Developer Experience team, shares how the company adopted OpenAPI schema to generate its SDKs. The team faced challenges in maintaining three sources of truth for their API and decided to use an OpenAPI schema as a point of reference to generate documentation, client libraries, and part of their API. They learned valuable lessons along the way, including dealing with issues related to the Plaid API implementation, code generators, and templates. The team also had to modify their authentication process to match an OpenAPI authentication schema and made additive changes to ensure compatibility with existing libraries.

We've made several enhancements to improve your experience with our products, including a new 'check_number' field in the Transactions API to help verify check transactions, additional insights into Institution Status on the Dashboard for better historical views and institution status, and investments custom sandbox available for testing. Our client libraries are now supported by OpenAPI schema, allowing you to auto-generate your own client libraries, and we're exploring ways to surface more data insights from transactions data. We've also improved Link with guided customer connections, sandbox testing for OAuth, and integration best practices, including a required upgrade for Link SDKs.

Plaid has developed an income verification product called Plaid Income, which aims to simplify the process of proving income for consumers and enhance underwriting processes for lenders with reliable income data. The product offers three income verification methods - Payroll Income, Document Income, and Bank Income - to cater to various types of income earners. Since its beta launch in March, Plaid Income has received positive feedback from early partners and significantly improved the user experience by speeding up onboarding flows and enabling customers to offer services to a broader range of consumers. The product is suitable for multiple use cases such as mortgage, personal lending, auto lending, property management, and more.

Plaid has introduced new enhancements to its Institution Status feature, including historical and client-specific views of institution health directly in the Dashboard. These improvements provide data-driven insights to help support users more effectively. The update includes a graphical view showing an institution's connection health over the past two weeks and insight into transaction data freshness for each institution. This helps troubleshoot user issues more quickly and efficiently, improving customer experience.

The article discusses the importance of fast and easy account validation for onboarding more customers in the financial services industry. It highlights that consumers expect instant access to their money, which traditional authentication methods like microdeposits cannot provide. This leads to a 'leaky funnel' where many newly opened accounts go unfunded within the first 30 days. The article suggests using Plaid's Instant Auth for account validation as it can speed up the process from days to less than a second for most US accounts, offering better user experience and security. It also mentions that Plaid supports 100% of US depository accounts through various authentication methods. Furthermore, the article discusses how improving the onboarding experience with Plaid has helped some customers increase their conversion rates significantly.

YouLend offers a tech-first approach to SME financing by using nonconventional data points such as monthly card payment data, cash flow, repeat buyer behavior, and digital footprint to evaluate creditworthiness. Traditional banks struggle with underwriting SMEs due to the need to hold significant capital against loans, making them less profitable. To address this, tech companies like YouLend have stepped in to provide alternative financing options for SMEs that might not qualify otherwise. By leveraging data from platforms such as Plaid, YouLend's software platform can assess a business' immediate cash-flow position without the hassle of manual file uploads or photographs. This approach allows YouLend to extend credit to SMEs that traditional banks may have missed.