As Plaid has expanded its fintech services, it has also expanded its customer base.
Plaid started out as a company that connected consumers’ bank accounts to financial apps, but has since gradually expanded its offerings to also include lending, identity verification, credit reporting, anti-fraud, and payments.
The 11-year-old company was on the verge of being acquired by Visa for $5 billion before antitrust regulators shut down the deal. Plaid went on to raise funding at a $13.4 billion valuation after the deal fell through and has been diversifying its revenue streams since then.
In its early days, the fintech giant mostly sold to other fintech companies. Then more banks and financial institutions got into the mix. Today, its client base also includes generally larger companies looking to integrate solutions into their offerings, including a mix of established fintechs and established companies, such as Venmo, SoFi, Chime, Rocket Money, H&R Block, Western Union, Affirm, Citi, and Shopify. .
So it’s fitting that earlier this year Plaid appointed Jennifer (Jen) Taylor as its first president. Taylor has years of experience at larger companies, most recently serving as chief product officer at Cloudflare. Before Cloudflare, Taylor held senior leadership positions at Salesforce, Facebook (now Meta), and Adobe, and spent two years as a venture capitalist.
“I’ve had the privilege of working at some very large companies that probably weren’t necessarily large when I joined and I’ve been able to be part of the effort, for example, to move from one product to multiple products and from one market segment to one,” she said in an interview with TechCrunch. Multiple market.
Plaid’s growth is outside of fintech
This expansion into a multi-product company has seen Plaid start to see real traction beyond traditional fintech clients. In fact, the company says the growth of traditional financial institutions and institutions is beginning to outpace the rest of its business.
Plaid has grown its enterprise customer base to more than 1,000, Taylor told TechCrunch, adding hundreds of new enterprise customers over the past year. The company now has 8,000 total customers.
“Our broader product suite, which includes onboarding, payments, lending and anti-fraud, has opened doors with enterprise companies like RealPage, H&R Block and Western Union that wouldn’t have been on the table a few years ago,” Taylor said. She added that the aim is for Plaid to develop into a “one-stop shop” for its customers by offering a range of integrated products that meet their broader business needs.
Meanwhile, product lines such as identity, payments and credit are growing “five times faster” than core account connectivity products, according to the company. In fact, Plaid’s identity product is currently the fastest growing product line with over 50% of its customers there being non-fintech clients.
“As our new products gain traction, it has helped Plaid grow into new markets that didn’t exist before,” Kevin Young, Plaid’s head of product communications, said in an interview. “And as these new products grow, it drives us into new market segments.”
The startup has also gained clients in proptech, property management, e-commerce and auto lending. For example, it now counts Zillow, Faire, Carvana, and CarMax as customers.
Overall, the company says it connects to 12,000 banks and financial institutions with 500 million connected accounts.
Why launched Plaid Layer, its in-house revamp
On June 18, it unveiled its latest offering, layera new product designed to unify “all of the critical setup steps” for users — from identity verification to bank account linking — “into one secure, instant experience.”
Alan Meyer, Plaid’s head of identity, says Layer can cut 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 through Plaid when signing up for other accounts simply have to enter their phone number and can do things like complete the sign-up process to apply for a loan or fund their account “with just a few clicks.” Clients so far include Possible Finance and Empower.
Mayer likened the Layer experience to shopping with Amazon.
“When we’re going to buy things, we generally use Amazon. Why do we do that? Because we know our information will be safe. They already have our payment method. Payment will be very fast and we know what to expect,” he said. “So we said to ourselves, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could have the same kind of experience and the same kind of consumer choice for the user experience?’
This increased ease of integration should lead to higher conversion rates for Plaid customers, Mayer added.
For Taylor, this is also part of securing financial information in the coming world where AI is doing more and more. “The real impact is the differentiation it creates for our network and the products we build on top of it, including underwriting and payments.”
Plaid has been vocal about its plans to go public, though it has not yet set a timeline. But Taylor’s appointment, as well as that of a CFO, point to those plans.
The company’s strategy of going into the business world is a familiar one, as other large fintech companies have also gone in this direction. Payments giant Stripe (a partner and competitor to Plaid) has long been focused on enterprise. Expense management startup Brex, while still serving startups, announced that it is looking to boost its enterprise client base.
The big question is how its approach will resonate with investors when it eventually goes public.
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