Why intelligent finance needs purpose-built AI infrastructure
Blog post from Plaid
Intelligent finance is increasingly reliant on purpose-built AI infrastructure to meet rising consumer expectations for faster, personalized, and transparent financial services. The evolution of open finance has facilitated secure data movement, allowing fintech builders to work with real financial signals. However, the challenge now lies in transforming connected data into meaningful understanding, which necessitates infrastructure specifically designed for finance, enabling insights and adaptive decision-making at scale. General-purpose AI struggles with the complex signals driving financial outcomes, making specialized models essential. Plaid has developed a network leveraging AI to enhance fraud detection and payment risk decisions, using its vast data network for continual model improvement. By building an intelligence layer and a trust layer, Plaid aims to support agentic finance, where AI not only analyzes but also acts on financial data responsibly. As AI capabilities become standard, companies must invest in data foundations and trust layers to safely deploy intelligence at scale, thus transforming financial intelligence into durable infrastructure that aligns with consumer trust and regulatory understanding.