A Brief History of Plaid

[sumonasumonakha.tu1]

Plaid is an American financial technology company founded in the early 21st century (2013) by Zach Perret and William Hockey in San Francisco, California. Zach Perret and William Hockey first met as young consultants at Bain & Co.'s Atlanta office. The duo then began building a personal finance application, which was born out of frustration with the lack of transparency in the bills they were paying.

Despite their best efforts, they were unable to successfully build a personal finance application, as developing custom integrations for each financial institution was a daunting task. However, they did not let this setback stop them. Instead, the duo shifted their focus to creating a platform that could act as a middleware between financial institutions and developers. Thus, Plaid was born with the mission to “democratize financial services through technology.”

One of Plaid’s early adopters was Venmo. Venmo’s head of engineering, who happened to be a friend of Perret fantuan data and Hockey, wanted a more efficient way to connect Venmo to a user’s bank account. Venmo relied on settling transactions in large batches, which led to delayed payments and added risk for the peer-to-peer transfer company. Using Plaid, Venmo was able to verify and connect to a user’s bank account across multiple banks more quickly and easily. Other apps, such as Robinhood, Acorns, and Coinbase, quickly adopted Plaid after learning about the partnership’s success.

In 2015, Plaid shifted its focus to developing its API (application programming interface) platform and began partnering with other fintech companies. And by 2016, Plaid had connected with more than 1,700 financial institutions in the United States and Canada, giving users access to connect their bank accounts to a range of apps and services.