FinTech news in Plaid category

Earlier this year, Stripe announced a new product called Financial Connections, which gives Stripe’s customers a way to connect directly to their customer’s bank accounts, to access financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions. More recently, Plaid announced that it had named Meta veteran John Anderson to serve as its new head of payments as it began personally facilitating payments through its Transfer offering, in addition to facilitating its partners’ payments. In a practice that is becoming increasingly common, the company is also accelerating equity grants for employees who worked at the company for more than one year to the February 15, 2023 vesting date. Fintech decacorn Plaid is laying off 260 employees, or about 20% of its workforce, the company announced today.

In an interview with journalist, Anderson explained that while Plaid will be personally facilitating payments through its Transfer offering, it will also continue working with its dozens of payments partners, which include the likes of Square, Stripe, Marqeta, Gusto and Silicon Valley Bank. In its own way, Anderson pointed out, Plaid has been involved in digital payments for years, by enabling nearly a billion ACH transactions for things like account funding and account-to-account transfers. In working with its payment partners over the years, Anderson said that Plaid saw a consistent challenge — that it usually took several days for an ACH transfer to complete. Specifically, Stripe’s Financial Connections was designed to give that company’s customers a way to connect directly to their customers’ bank accounts, to access financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions — exactly what Plaid has done historically.

This year, Argyle announced a $55 million Series B funding round and the launch of a self-service tool so that consumers can access their employment records with ease. Argyle, which wants to help companies and institutions get access to employment records, has laid off a number of employees across all departments, journalist has learned from sources. CEO and co-founder Shmulik Fishman said he wanted to disrupt the process in which institutions buy records from third parties and instead bring user consent into the mix. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the workforce reduction to journalist, saying that it let go of 6.5% of the team, or 20 people.

Plaid, the company building data transfer technologies to power fintech and digital finance products like smartphone-based wallets, today announced that it adding support for thousands of crypto exchanges to its data network.

Beyond those new offerings, in what is perhaps the most surprising new news to come out of the company today, Plaid said it is also hoping to turn new users into active customers through account funding, which will give people a way to pay, or be paid, for goods and services.

Stripe’s launch of its new Financial Connections product. The product launch in and of itself was newsworthy, yes. But what elevated it in the world of newsworthiness was that it sparked some controversy, as it is pretty much exactly what Plaid, a one-time partner of Stripe’s, does

Those updates to Stripe’s ACH Debit product were a hint of the news today considering that it was launched with the ability to instantly verify bank accounts, a feature that is competitive with Plaid’s Auth product.

Skyflow, which sells data privacy tools for corporate customers, this morning announced a partnership with Plaid, a unicorn that helps pass fintech data between parties through an API. So, data privacy matters quite a lot to Plaid, and Skyflow was willing to cook up a special variation of its standard product recipe just for the fintech API company’s customers. Sharma also stressed that due to the technology that underpins Skyflow — polymorphic data encryption — users of his company data storage system can still run workflows and analysis on their information without decrypting it. I’d hazard that Plaid views data privacy in the fintech space as a key plank undergirding its future; if consumers lose faith that using fintech apps and services is secure, their interest in connecting with said products could decline.

A developer-focused bank Column emerges from stealth today to — if Hockey’s pronouncements are to be believed — turn the fintech industry on its head. By contrast, Column, a nationally chartered bank with a direct connection to the Fed, has an in-house ledger and data model to power various fintech services.

And with Plaid customers asking for ways to more quickly onboard users per Perret, Plaid knew that it had customer demand for what the smaller company had built; buying Cognito means that Plaid can instantly layer on another service to its already growing customer base.