As Plaid has expanded its fintech services, it has also grown its customer base.
Plaid began as a company that connects consumer bank accounts with 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 nearly acquired by Visa for $5 billion before antitrust regulators blocked the deal. Plaid raised funding at a $13.4 billion valuation after the deal fell through and has since worked to diversify its revenue streams.
In its beginnings, the fintech giant mainly sold to other fintechs. Later, more banks and financial institutions joined. Today, its customer base also includes general large enterprises looking to integrate solutions into their offerings, including a mix of established fintechs and traditional 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 named Jennifer (Jen) Taylor as its first female president. Taylor has years of experience at larger companies and most recently served as Cloudflare’s chief product officer. Prior to Cloudflare, Taylor held senior leadership roles at Salesforce, facebook (now Meta), and Adobe and worked for two years as a venture capitalist.
“I had the privilege of working at some very large companies that maybe weren't necessarily that big when I joined and I was able to be part of the efforts, for example, of moving from a single product to a multi-product and from a single market segment to a multiple market segment,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.
Plaid's growth beyond fintech
That expansion into a multi-product company has seen Plaid start to see real momentum beyond traditional fintech customers. In fact, the company says growth from traditional financial institutions and enterprises is starting to outpace the rest of its business.
Plaid has grown its enterprise customer base to more than 1,000, having added hundreds of new enterprise customers over the past year, Taylor told TechCrunch exclusively. The company's total customer base is 8,000.
“Our broader product suite, spanning onboarding, payments, lending and anti-fraud, has opened doors for enterprise companies like RealPage, H&R Block and Western Union that weren’t on the table just a few years ago,” Taylor said. The goal, he added, is for Plaid to evolve into a “one-stop shop” for its customers, offering a suite of integrated products that address their broader business needs.
Meanwhile, product lines like 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 non-fintechs.
“As our new products have gained traction, we've helped Plaid grow into new markets where it didn't have a presence before,” said Kevin Young, Plaid's head of product communications, in an interview. “And as those new products grow, that pushes us into new market segments.”
The startup has also been gaining clients in the real estate technology, property management, e-commerce and auto lending sectors. For example, it now counts Zillow, Faire, Carvana and CarMax among its clients.
In total, the company says it connects to 12,000 banks and financial institutions with 500 million connected accounts.
Why Plaid launched Layer and its onboarding revamp
On June 18, he revealed his latest offering, Layera new product designed to unify “all critical onboarding steps” for users, from identity verification to linking bank accounts, “into one secure, instant experience.”
Alain Meier, head of identity at Plaid, says Layer can reduce the time it takes someone to sign up for an app or service by 90%. In most cases, people who already stored their data through Plaid when they signed up for other accounts just need to enter their phone number and they can do things like complete the onboarding to apply for a loan or fund their accounts “with just a few clicks.” Clients so far include Possible Finance and Empower.
Meier compared the Layer experience to shopping on amazon.
“When we go to buy things, we generally use amazon. Why do we do it? Because we know that our information will be safe. They already have our payment method. The payment process will be extremely fast and we know what to expect,” he said. “So we said, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could have the same kind of experience and the same kind of choice of user experience for the consumer?'”
That greater ease of onboarding has the potential to drive higher conversion rates for Plaid customers, Meier added.
For Taylor, this is also all part of protecting financial information in the coming world, where ai will perform more tasks. “The real impact is the differentiation it creates for our network and the products we build on top of it, including subscription and paid ones.”
Plaid has been vocal about its plans to go public, though it hasn't set a timeline yet. But the hiring of Taylor, as well as the hiring of a chief financial officer, point to those plans.
The company's strategy to boost business is familiar, as other large fintechs have also gone in this direction. Payments giant Stripe (Plaid's partner and competitor) has long focused on the company. Expense management startup Brex, while still serving startups, also announced it is looking to bolster its enterprise customer base.
The big question is how its approach will resonate with investors when it eventually goes public.
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