Fintech
Plaid, once primarily focused on fintech, is expanding its enterprise business and now has over 1,000 registered customers
AS Plaid expanded its fintech services and, at the same time, expanded its customer base.
Plaid began as a company that connected consumers’ bank accounts to financial apps, but has since gradually expanded its offerings to include lending, identity verification, credit reporting, fraud prevention and payments.
The 11-year-old company was nearly acquired by Visa for $5 billion before antitrust regulators terminated the deal. Plaid continued to raise funds a valuation of $13.4 billion After the deal fell through and has since worked to diversify its revenue streams.
At first, the fintech giant mainly sold to other fintechs. Subsequently, other banks and financial institutions were added to the mix. Today, its customer base also includes large corporates at large looking to incorporate 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.
So it’s fitting that earlier this year, Plaid named Jennifer (Jen) Taylor as its first president. Taylor has years of experience at large enterprises, having most recently served as Chief Product Officer at Cloudflare. Prior to Cloudflare, Taylor held senior management 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 had the opportunity to be part of efforts to, for example, move from single-product to multi-product and from single-market segment to multi-market segment,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.
Plaid’s Growth Beyond Fintech
This expansion into a multi-product company has led Plaid to start seeing real traction beyond traditional fintech customers. In fact, the company says growth from traditional businesses and financial institutions is starting to outpace the rest of its business.
Plaid has expanded its enterprise customer base to more than 1,000, having added hundreds of new enterprise customers in the past year, Taylor told TechCrunch exclusively. The company’s total number of customers is 8,000.
“Our broader suite of products, which includes onboarding, payments, lending and fraud, has opened doors for enterprise 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 evolve into “a one-stop shop” for its customers by offering a suite of integrated products that address 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 being non-fintech customers.
“The fact that our new products have gained traction has helped Plaid grow in new markets where it wasn’t present before,” Kevin Young, Plaid’s head of product communications, said in an interview. “And the growth of these new products pushes us into new market segments.”
The startup has also acquired customers in proptech, property management, e-commerce and auto lending. For example, it now counts Zillow, Faire, Carvana and CarMax as customers.
Overall, the company claims to connect to 12,000 banks and financial institutions with 500 million linked accounts.
Why Plaid Launched Layer, Its Onboarding Revamp
On June 18, he revealed his latest offer, Layera new product designed to unify “all 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 cut the time it takes for someone to sign up for an app or service by 90%. In most cases, people who already have their data stored through Plaid simply enter their phone number when they sign up for other accounts 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 compared the Layer experience to shopping on Amazon.
“When we go to buy something, we typically default to Amazon. Why do we do that? Because we know our information is going to be safe. They already have our payment method. It’s going to be super fast to check out, and we know what to expect,” he said. “So we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could have that same kind of experience and that same kind of choice in the consumer experience?'”
Image credits: PlaidImage Credits: Plaid
This increased ease of onboarding can potentially lead to higher conversion rates for Plaid customers, Meier added.
For Taylor, it’s also all part of protecting financial information in the coming world where artificial intelligence multitasks. “The real impact is the differentiation it creates for our network and the products we build on top of it, including subscription and payments.”
Plaid has been open about its plans to go public, though it hasn’t yet set a timeline. But Taylor’s hiring, as well as the hiring of a chief financial officer, underscore those plans.
The company’s strategy of a push into enterprise is familiar, as other large fintechs have also taken this direction. Payments giant Stripe (both Plaid’s partner and competitor) has long been focused on the venture. Expense management startup Brex, while continuing to serve startups, also announced that it was looking to strengthen its corporate customer base.
The big question is how his approach will be received by investors when the company finally goes public.
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