May 2024 Summaries

On May 30, 2024, Western Union collaborated with Plaid for faster, more secure payments in Europe. The partnership provides Western Union's customers with seamless open banking payments, giving them additional flexibility in how to send money to their families and loved ones. This collaboration enhances efficiency and security while offering higher transaction thresholds. It also supports Western Union's internal operations by streamlining its payment infrastructure and providing a common standard of funding across Europe.

Open banking regulation is coming to the U.S., with the CFPB's 1033 rule expected to arrive this fall. Plaid, a financial services company, has prepared an open banking readiness tool kit to help its customers prepare for evolving regulation more easily and confidently. The key requirements in the CFPB's 1033 proposal include authorization management and data deletion, record retention, and onboarding. Plaid is launching several solutions over the coming months to address these expected requirements, including Data Transparency Messaging (DTM), which provides a standardized way for apps and services on the Plaid network to give an even greater level of information to consumers about how their data is being used ahead of the anticipated 1033 rule's requirements.

Plaid has transitioned to a multi-cluster Elasticsearch architecture to improve the reliability of its logging system. The company's previous single 120-node cluster was struggling under the weight of over 50,000 logs per second across thousands of Kubernetes containers. This resulted in frequent delays and lost logs, impacting both engineers and customer support operations. The new architecture involves a multi-cluster Elasticsearch setup with per-service log streams, allowing for better isolation of critical services and more flexible management of the load across hundreds of internal services that emit logs. Using cross-cluster search with a gateway cluster, Plaid maintained a single front-end for log queries and dashboards while seeing no impact on query performance. Since launching this new architecture, log delay has reduced by over 95%, providing customers with reliable and instant access to insights. The observability team is now able to sleep more peacefully at night. This post covers the decision-making process, details of the new architecture and migration, and lessons learned since the migration.

Capital on Tap, a business credit card and spend management platform, has expanded its partnership with Plaid to the UK. The collaboration leverages Plaid's open banking infrastructure to provide UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with more efficient access to funding. This builds upon Capital on Tap and Plaid's successful partnership in the US, which began back in January 2023. The integration brings benefits such as streamlined onboarding, smoother funding process through extensive bank coverage, and enhanced credit decisioning with advanced analytics.

Plaid Beacon, an anti-fraud network for fintechs and financial institutions, has added bank account insights to help companies strengthen their defense against fraud. The addition of these insights will aid in identifying stolen identities, synthetic accounts, and account takeovers (ATO). Companies can now analyze their Plaid-linked accounts for fraud indicators, leveraging the vast Plaid network to improve existing fraud prevention models. Beacon's collaborative nature allows companies to report fraud, enabling others to instantly screen users against this database without revealing personally identifiable information (PII). Over 20 participating companies are using Beacon to reduce fraud incidents and protect millions of consumers.

Plaid Effects 2024 will discuss the future of finance, focusing on trends shaping the industry such as improving consumer experiences, expanding credit underwriting opportunities, driving faster and more cost-effective payments, and deterring fraud. The event will feature discussions with industry leaders and builders reimagining financial services across various sectors including payments, taxes, crypto, and credit. Plaid's unique vantage point provides insights into the evolving financial ecosystem and its potential future developments.