Plaid Expands Beyond Fintech, Now Serving Over 1,000 Enterprise Customers
As Plaid continues to grow its fintech services, its customer base has also expanded. The company, which connects consumer bank accounts to financial applications, has been gradually expanding its offerings to include lending, identity verification, credit reporting, anti-fraud, and payments.
In its early days, Plaid mostly sold to other fintechs. However, its customer base now includes large companies looking to embed solutions into their offerings, including a mix of established fintechs and incumbents, such as Venmo, SoFi, Chime, Rocket Money, H&R Block, Western Union, Affirm, Citi, and Shopify.
Jennifer (Jen) Taylor, Plaid's first president, has years of experience at larger companies, having most recently served as Cloudflare's chief product officer. Prior to Cloudflare, Taylor held high-level leadership positions at Salesforce, Facebook (now Meta), and Adobe and had a two-year stint as a venture capitalist.
"I've had the privilege of working at some very large companies that maybe weren't necessarily that large when I joined and I got to be a part of efforts, for example, of going from single product to multi product and from single market segment to multi market segment," Taylor said in an interview.
Plaid's Growth Beyond Fintech
The expansion into being a multi-product company has led to Plaid starting to see real traction beyond traditional fintech customers. In fact, the company says that enterprise and traditional financial institutions growth is starting to outpace the rest of its business.
Plaid has grown its enterprise customer base to over 1,000, having added hundreds of new enterprise customers over the last year. The company's total customer count is 8,000.
"Our broader product suite, encompassing onboarding, payments, lending, and anti-fraud, has opened doors with enterprise companies like RealPage, H&R Block, and Western Union that weren’t on the table a few years ago," Taylor said. The goal, she added, is for Plaid to evolve into “a one-stop shop” for its customers by offering a suite of integrated products that address their wider business needs.
Meanwhile, product lines such as identity, payments, and credit are growing “five times faster” than its core account connectivity products, according to the company. In fact, Plaid’s identity product is currently its fastest-growing product line with more than 50% of its customers there being non-fintech clients.
"As our new products have gained traction, it’s helped Plaid grow into new markets that it didn’t have a presence before," said Kevin Young, Plaid’s head of product comms, in an interview. "And as those new products grow, that’s pushing us into new market segments."
The company has also been gaining customers in the proptech, property management, e-commerce, and auto lending spaces. For example, it now counts Zillow, Faire, Carvana, and CarMax as customers.
Overall, the company says that it connects to 12,000 banks and financial institutions with 500 million connected accounts.
Introducing Layer, Plaid's Onboarding Revamp
On June 18, it revealed its latest offering, Layer, a new product designed to unify “all the critical onboarding steps” for users — from identity verification to bank account linking — “into one secure, instant experience.”
Alain Meier, Plaid’s head of identity, says Layer can reduce the time it takes for someone to sign up for an app or service by 90%. In most cases, people who have already stored their details via Plaid when signing up for other accounts just have to input their phone number and can do things like complete onboarding to apply for a loan or fund their accounts “in just a few clicks.” Customers so far include Possible Finance and Empower.
Meier likened the Layer experience to shopping with Amazon.
“When we’re going to buy things, in general we default to using Amazon. Why do we do that? Because we know that our information is going to be secure. They’ve already got our payment method. It’s going to be extremely fast to check out and we know what to expect,” he said. “So we said to ourselves, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could have the same type of experience and that same type of consumer choice of user experience?’”
That increased ease of onboarding has the potential to lead to higher conversion rates for Plaid’s customers, Meier added.
For Taylor, it’s also all part of securing financial information in the upcoming world where AI does more tasks. “The true impact is the differentiation it creates for our network and the products we build on top of it, including underwriting and payments.”
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