As Plaid has expanded its fintech services, so has its customer base.
Plaid began as a company that connects consumer bank accounts with financial applications, 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 nearly acquired by Visa for $5 billion before antitrust regulators shut down the deal. Plaid continued to raise funding at a $13.4 billion valuation after the deal fell through, and has since worked to diversify its revenue streams.
In its early days, the fintech giant mostly sold to other fintechs. Subsequently, more banks and financial institutions entered the mix. Today, its customer base also includes large companies in general looking to integrate 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 .
Well, it’s only fitting that earlier this year, Plaid named Jennifer (Jen) Taylor to serve as its first president. Taylor has years of experience at larger companies, most recently serving as Cloudflare’s Chief Product Officer. Prior to Cloudflare, Taylor held senior 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 in some very large companies that maybe weren’t necessarily that large when I joined, and I’ve had to be part of efforts to, for example, go from single product to multi-product and single market segment to multi-market segment” , she told TechCrunch in an interview.
Plaid’s growth beyond fintech
This expansion into a multi-product company saw Plaid start to see real traction beyond traditional fintech customers. In fact, the company says its corporate 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 past year, Taylor told TechCrunch exclusively. The total number of customers of the company is 8,000.
“Our broader product suite, which includes onboarding, payments, lending and anti-fraud, has opened doors with companies like RealPage, H&R Block and Western Union that weren’t on the table a few years ago” , Taylor said. The goal, he added, is for Plaid to become “a one-stop shop” for its customers, offering a suite of integrated products that meet their broader 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 customers.
“As our new products have gained traction, it’s helped Plaid grow into new markets it didn’t have a presence in before,” Kevin Young, Plaid’s head of product communications, said in an interview. “And as these new products grow, that pushes us into new segments of the market.”
The startup has also won clients in the proptech, property management, e-commerce and car lending spaces. For example, it now counts Zillow, Faire, Carvana and CarMax as clients.
In total, the company says it is connected to 12,000 banks and financial institutions with 500 million linked accounts.
Why Plaid released Layer, its integration
On June 18, it revealed its latest offering, Layera new product designed to unify “all critical onboarding steps” for users — from identity verification to bank account connection — “into one secure, instant experience.”
Alain Meier, Plaid’s head of identity, says Layer can cut the time it takes to sign up for an app or service by 90 percent. In most cases, people who have already saved their details through Plaid when signing up for other accounts just need to enter their phone number and can do things like complete onboarding to apply for a loan or fund their their accounts “with just a few clicks”. Clients so far include Possible Finance and Empower.
Meier likened the Layer experience to shopping with Amazon.
“When it comes to buying things, we generally default to Amazon. Why do we do this? Because we know our information will be safe. They already have our payment method. It will be extremely quick to check 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 the same type of consumer user experience choice?’
This increased ease of integration has the potential to lead to higher conversion rates for Plaid customers, Meier added.
For Taylor, it’s also part of securing financial information in the coming world where AI does more work. “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 spoken about its plans to go public, although it has yet to set a timetable. But the hiring of Taylor as well as the hiring of a CFO point to those plans.
The company’s strategy to push the business is well known, as other major fintechs have moved in this direction. Payments giant Stripe (both Plaid’s partner and competitor) has long focused on business. Spend management startup Brex, while still catering to startups, has also announced that it is looking to boost its enterprise customer base.
How its approach will resonate with investors when it finally goes public is the big question.
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