August 2022 Summaries

We're investing in expanding Plaid's network reach to new geographies and people across the world to better support the online payment ecosystem, growing our payment partner ecosystem with two new partners Norbr and GlobePay, and building out geographic coverage to deliver open banking payments and data services across Europe. We've recently added capabilities for Spain and Poland, offering an app-to-app experience in Spain that creates a smooth customer experience and increases conversion on mobile flows. Our expanded coverage has enabled companies like Kraken to offer easier onboarding and account funding experiences across Europe, with at least 90% coverage of consumer and business accounts in most markets. We're committed to meeting local needs and offering payment journeys that people are accustomed to as they transition toward digital finance.

Synthetic identity fraud is a growing concern, becoming the number one threat to financial services in the near future. It involves creating fake identities that combine real personal information with fabricated data, often used to defraud financial institutions or individuals. The rise of synthetic identity fraud can be attributed to the vast amount of personally identifiable information available on the dark web and the difficulty in detecting these fake identities using traditional algorithms. To prevent this type of fraud, it is crucial to evaluate multiple sources of identification, use sophisticated neural networks, and run a host of fraud checks to detect other flags indicative of fraudulent activity.

Green Dot, an online bank and fintech platform, aims to serve the underbanked population by offering a chartered bank account, direct sales to consumers through its mobile app, partnerships with large companies like Apple and Amazon, and a retail network of over 90,000 locations nationwide. The company's flagship product, GO2bank, offers features such as overdraft protection, high-yield savings accounts, secure credit cards, and seamless integration with fintech apps and services through Plaid Exchange. Green Dot prioritizes innovation and customer feedback, using design thinking to develop products that address the financial needs of its customers. By providing affordable banking solutions and empowering customers with access to their financial information, Green Dot is well-positioned to tackle the open finance movement and make financial services more accessible to a previously underserved population.

Hameto Benkreira, Head of Growth at PadSplit, a digital affordable housing marketplace, is on a mission to solve the affordable housing crisis by providing safe and cost-effective housing options for low-income workers who serve their communities. PadSplit uses Plaid Income to automate income verification, which enables real-time verifications, faster completion times, and reduces manual intervention with better data accuracy, fraud controls, and process automation. This allows the company to onboard more users quickly, tackling the affordable housing crisis one rental at a time. By leveraging Plaid's real-time income verification tools, PadSplit has been able to scale its growth significantly, tripling its growth in the past year alone, while maintaining a small and focused team. The company plans to continue expanding into new markets, understanding local market nuances, and tackling complex user segments such as students and variable-income earners. Hameto's advice for fellow product managers or engineers is to focus on data-driven growth, "dogfooding" with the operations team, and prioritizing obvious value props like cost, quality, access, and speed.

Data portability can maximize the value of crypto by enabling seamless connections, safer experiences, and innovation at the intersection of crypto and digital finance. By supporting data sharing between traditional and crypto finances, consumers can engage holistically with their financial products and services. Plaid has onboarded millions of consumers onto crypto applications and is ready to support the next generation of digital finance as they bridge together their traditional and crypto financial lives. Data portability benefits crypto tremendously by enabling consumers to seamlessly onboard into crypto experiences, expanding consumer touchpoints with their wallets of choice across a greater number of surfaces.