NewTech Friday: Plaid – Enabling all companies to build fintech solutions
Ripsy Bandourian is the Head of Europe at US fintech Plaid. She tells us more about Plaid and its open banking network and payments platform.
Ripsy Bandourian is the Head of Europe at US fintech Plaid. She tells us more about Plaid and its open banking network and payments platform.
What led to the creation of Plaid?
Plaid was founded in 2013 after CEO Zach Perret and his co-founder William Hockey were building a personal financial management app and realized how difficult it was to connect to financial accounts. The two co-founded Plaid to give developers easy, secure access to consumer-permissioned financial data capable of powering digital financial services. We expanded to the UK in 2019 and to the Netherlands in 2020 to continue to entrench across Europe.
The past few years have created a massive shift in consumer behavior and in expectations – people now expect connected experiences between the apps and services they use. In financial services, Plaid has largely enabled that shift, making it safe and easy for people to use their financial information where they choose to, with the help of open banking regulation and developers building on Plaid’s platform. However, new gaps in the ecosystem emerge as digital finance evolves. For example, many people now are buying and selling cryptocurrency, but it is very disjointed from the rest of their financial lives. As such, we’ll continue to create new solutions that help developers fill these gaps and enable people to manage their money however they want.
Today, Plaid’s mission remains similar to when the company first started: to unlock financial freedom for everyone. We want everyone to be able to manage their money however best suits them. We just released our 2022 edition of The Fintech Effect, a consumer survey of fintech adoption in the US and UK, and while it shows the majority of people are embracing digital finance, there has been a large uptick in financial stress, due to shifting economic and political climate. That tells us that there is plenty of work to be done to deliver the tools and services people need to manage their financial lives effectively.
I joined Plaid in April of this year to help the company meet rising demand for its services as consumers all over the world demand seamless, secure and reliable digital financial tools. That’s an exciting charter, but Plaid’s mission is hugely personal to me – I’m originally from Armenia and have lived in four different countries across three different continents. As such, I know the pain of trying to manage a financial life without the right tools to enable me to take my financial history with me as I moved. Today, Plaid and the thousands of companies building on Plaid make that a little easier, which I found incredibly powerful. Unlocking financial freedom for everyone isn’t an easy mission, but it's one I believe in deeply.
Could you present Plaid's offer?
Plaid powers digital financial experiences: our open banking network and payments platform is the easiest way to embed fintech products and services and onboard customers. Over 7,000 companies use Plaid to make it easy for their customers to connect and pay from their current accounts.
Plaid connects to 12,000 institutions across North America and Europe for companies to build global digital financial experiences. With Plaid, all it takes is one integration and the addition of a country code to move into a new market. We’ve helped companies like Gemini, Kraken, Wayflyer, Quirk, and more expand their services to new geographies.
Our offering combines our open banking data network with payment connectivity to create seamless experiences for every digital financial transaction. Our open banking product suite enables companies to verify customers’ identity, share real-time affordability insights, and send instant payments – all through one integration. And, our payment solutions improve the often manual and outdated payment user journey, eliminating the need for typing in account or card numbers.
We take a global and local approach to digital finance. Payment infrastructure needs massive global breadth and scale, but at the same time, it is a hyper-localized business. As such, we partner with payment service providers across industries and geographies and embed Plaid’s open banking solutions in their offerings to deliver the best experiences for local companies and consumers.
We power some of the most innovative fintech companies in Europe: for example, Shares, Europe’s first truly social investment platform. The company works to bring social investing to the masses and relies on Plaid for their customer onboarding and account funding. With Plaid’s instant payment solutions Shares was able to onboard tens of thousands of users as the primary account funding method with high conversions and instant payments, resulting in 40,000 weekly secure payments at a cheaper cost than cards. In the first six months with Plaid, we helped Shares customers make these 40,000 payments via open banking. Now, we’re helping Shares expand their reach into new markets.
What's coming next for Plaid?
At the high level, across all regions, we’re building full-stack solutions for onboarding and engaging people with digital finance, from verifying their identity to open a new account to funding that account and moving money into it on an ongoing basis to save more. How those products take shape varies across markets but the goal remains the same. Across both North America and Europe, we are focused on three key areas: making digital financial onboarding and engagement easier, improving and expanding our identity verification tools; offering enhanced developer tools for enhanced insights; and extending the reach of our network beyond core banking data to include additional data sources, such as cryptocurrencies.
We’re also working closely to enable the next phase of open banking innovation in Europe. Right now, the industry is at a crossroads. Regulations have been live for some time and policymakers are assessing how to adapt and make them work better to allow innovation to thrive, and ultimately, give people more choices and easier ways to manage their financial lives. From building Variable Recurring Payments, making one-click checkout a reality, to helping shape the transition to open finance, we are working with stakeholders from financial institutions, policymakers, fintech companies, and other open banking platforms to ensure digital financial innovation can thrive.
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