May 2022 Summaries

Portabl is on a mission to build universal financial identity for all, aiming to bring a new type of privacy, control, ease, and transparency to every consumer's financial life. The company integrates with know-your-customer and identity verification providers like Plaid to offer consumers verified credentials that can be used to streamline onboarding across web2 and web3. Portabl's founders, Nate Soffio and Alex Yenkalov, are driven by a desire to reconcile the challenges of identity compliance in the financial system, particularly for underrepresented groups. They believe that their work will simplify and automate many parts of the identity compliance stack, making it more cost-effective, inclusive, and equitable. The company has participated in Plaid Accelerate, a program supporting early-stage fintech founders who are Black, Indigenous, or People of Color, which has provided valuable feedback and support to help them scale their product. Portabl's approach is centered on empathy for users, aiming to create solutions that address the holistic experience, not just the obvious "problem".

Plaid Forum, an annual conference hosted in San Francisco, brought together developers, product experts, financial institutions, and industry leaders to discuss open finance innovations, trends, and data partners' role in ensuring consumers have the best digital technology experience. The event highlighted Plaid's API-first approach for secure and reliable consumer connections, as well as new products and solutions like Data Connectivity, Core Exchange, Plaid Identity Verification (IDV) and Monitor, App2App authentication, and Plaid Enrich. Additionally, partnerships with Current, Frost Bank, Green Dot, and Washington Federal were announced to provide open finance solutions for their customers.

At the recent Plaid Forum, Plaid unveiled new products and initiatives based on customer feedback, focusing on three key areas: improving account connectivity and conversion, providing better account-to-app connectivity, and expanding its platform to simplify sign-up and onboard processes. To achieve this, Plaid has made significant improvements in data quality, reliability, and coverage, enabled direct API integrations for the majority of its traffic, and added more types of companies and data types to its network. This includes identity verification solutions through the acquisition of Cognito, account funding and transfers, income verification, and fraud prevention tools that leverage insights from a growing network of data partners and customers. These enhancements aim to provide consumers with easier access to financial products while deepening their relationship with banks and digital finance companies, ultimately building for what comes next in fintech.

Plaid is expanding its platform to deliver a full-stack onboarding experience for businesses, introducing Plaid Identity Verification (IDV) and Monitor - a complete verification, AML, and KYC compliance solution available in early access. With IDV, customers can verify identities in as little as 30 seconds while fighting sophisticated threats like synthetic identity fraud. The solution handles all forms of verification methods, including authoritative data source, documentary, and liveness checks, and supports more than 16,000 document types through a single integration with Plaid. Monitor automates the verification process, removing manual reviews or intervention, and ensures AML compliance by scanning customers against regularly updated government lists using proprietary data enrichment and international name matching algorithm. The solution is built on Cognito's industry-leading ID verification technology, having already verified over 100 million identities and screened more than 700 million unique identities against government watchlists.

The financial lives of consumers are evolving rapidly due to the pandemic, leading to increased adoption of fintech applications and higher expectations for personalized experiences. To differentiate themselves, fintechs and financial service providers need robust transaction data and insights into user committed monthly expenses. Plaid is introducing a new endpoint called Recurring Transactions, which enables access to insights about recurring inflows and outflows in users' credit, checking, or savings accounts. This endpoint provides information on category, frequency, average and last amounts, and status of each stream, allowing developers to build engaging features like payment reminders that drive value for their business. With the Recurring Transactions endpoint, fintechs can help users understand their committed spend, reduce unnecessary subscriptions, and stay on track with upcoming payments.

Sync is a new paradigm for building on transaction data that aims to provide developers with direct access to feeds of changes to transaction data, reducing integration time and streamlining how developers access and work with transaction information. The original Plaid Transactions API used a "local copy pattern" where customers kept their own copy of user transactions and merged it with updates from Plaid, but this approach had limitations such as dealing with edge cases and inconsistencies. To address these challenges, Plaid has introduced Sync, which uses a diff-based model to deliver transaction data, providing a simpler and more efficient way for developers to integrate with Plaid's data. The new API design prioritizes simplicity, efficiency, and semantics, while also decoupling webhook delivery from consistency, allowing customers to focus on building scalable and robust systems without worrying about edge cases. With Sync, developers can build transaction-driven applications faster and easier, and Plaid is leading the fintech industry by introducing a new mental model for financial data delivery that guides customer feedback and innovation.

Plaid’s Data Connectivity solutions enable industry-aligned access to fintech applications, providing a streamlined way for financial services partners to create products that deliver secure and seamless data access to consumers. These solutions make it easy for all types of financial services partners to connect their customers to Plaid's network of over 6,000 fintech applications, eliminating third-party credential sharing and enhancing security and privacy. The new product Core Exchange streamlines the implementation of the Financial Data Exchange API specification, while Plaid Exchange supports emerging fintech data types like cryptocurrency, empowering data partners to unlock cutting-edge use cases and improve consumer control over their financial data.

We've made several exciting updates to our APIs this month, including the launch of two new endpoints: Recurring Transactions and Sync, which provide valuable insights into a user's recurring transactions and transaction data, respectively. These updates have improved latency for both the Transactions and Assets APIs, allowing developers to access more recent data with reduced wait times. We also remind you to upgrade to our latest SDKs and announce changes to OAuth reporting and Plaid Forum 2022, as well as highlighting a new customer success story with Wethos and their rapid banking launch facilitated by Plaid.

The European Commission has announced a call for evidence into the mandatory review of PSD2, which is expected to assess its impact and drive improvements in open banking legislation. Over the past five years, PSD2 has brought significant benefits to consumers and fostered innovation in financial services. Key areas of focus during this review include new market players, strong customer authentication, transparency requirements, access to payment account data, sanctioning powers, cross-border payments, and international payment rules between EU countries and other nations. Plaid's analysis highlights the positive impact of PSD2 on both providers and users of payment services, while also noting areas for improvement such as a fragmented European payments landscape and high levels of burden on TPPs that provide PIS/AIS.

The Plaid Forum is an upcoming event on May 19th that aims to bring together thousands of developers, business leaders, and innovators in the digital finance industry. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the latest trends in fintech, attend specialized learning tracks, witness new product announcements from Plaid, connect with Plaid product experts, and gain unprecedented access to the Plaid team and top customers. The event is free for all attendees and offers live and on-demand content to support businesses at various stages of their digital finance journey.

Ashley Cornall is a Product Manager at Plaid, focusing on bringing new products to market. She works with engineering, design, and go-to-market teams to create innovative solutions for users' financial needs. Her role involves listening to customer feedback and determining if Plaid can help build the right products. The company aims to unlock financial freedom for everyone by creating inclusive and accessible financial products. Plaid has a culture of inclusion, with a flat organizational structure that encourages collaboration and diverse perspectives. Employees are encouraged to voice their opinions and contribute ideas, leading to better decision-making and product development. The company's mission-oriented approach and emphasis on ethical practices set it apart from other places Ashley has worked. Ashley loves working at Plaid due to the people and the shared commitment to making a positive impact in the world. She believes that curiosity, empathy, and continuous learning are essential qualities for a successful product manager. Her advice for those exploring career opportunities is to prioritize variety and experiences that align with their interests and passions. To unwind, Ashley enjoys making things like knitting, painting, or baking in her downtime. She also finds solace in nature and reading books. The best piece of advice she has received is to focus on the tasks only she can do, which helps her prioritize her time and energy effectively.

Plaid FinRise has been rebranded as Plaid Accelerate, emphasizing its commitment to accelerating equity within the financial ecosystem. The program supports founders of color and is now accepting applications for its third cohort. Plaid Accelerate offers tailored programming, mentorship, access to industry leaders, and support from a strong partner network. The five-month intensive program targets startups with seed funding or preparing to raise a seed round, having a product in the market with customer traction, and looking to accelerate their growth.