Plaid offers the world’s largest open finance platform. Plaid specialises in bank connectivity and provides a single API for customers to integrate with banks around the world. They have had innovative success stories working with companies like Western Union and MoneyBox. Plaid see opportunities around current trends such as account-to-account payments, variable recurring payments, and cash flow underwriting for businesses and consumers.

At Money20/20 Europe, FinTech Strategy spoke with Plaid’s Product Lead for Europe, Zak Lambert, to learn more…

Tell us about Plaid…

“I work in product management for Plaid in Europe. We’re the world’s largest open finance platform operating across 20 markets in Europe and North America. Back in 2019 when we first launched in Europe our bread and butter was bank connectivity. Integrating with over 10,000 banks through a single API. We still provide that connectivity in one API for our customers. Millions of users go through that journey every day for a number of different use cases.

Building on the core bank connectivity capabilities, we’ve spent the last few years building localised value added services. We launched underwriting services to help companies such as YouLend provide more credit with less risk. We optimised our Pay by Bank offering so companies like Western Union can provide instant transfers with higher thresholds, and companies like PokerStars can provide seamless and instant payouts.

Tell us about your role at Plaid?

“I was part of the team that started Plaid in New York and opened the office there. I did a variety of things from helping customers integrate, building new products, working with sales teams, and anything else that would help us grow, About a year after that, I moved over to London to be the first person on the ground there. Fast forward five years and I’m delighted to be the head of product in Europe. I’ve been with the company for about five and a half years. Overall, it’s just been an exciting journey from a hundred people to more than a thousand now.”

Talk about some of the successful integrations Plaid is involved in…

“We recently announced that we’re working with Western Union across Europe to fund transfers, whether that’s someone depositing in the UK and Germany, Italy or Spain. Plaid is powering account to account payments for Western Union across their various use cases. Particularly when you look at the growing trend around account-to-account payments and pay by bank, we’re thrilled to be working with brands of that caliber. Since launch we’ve seen hockey stick growth for their customer adoption of pay by bank. This shows trust and reliability of the open banking ecosystem which we’re excited to be a part of. We are also delighted to be supporting MoneyBox, one of the largest fintechs in the UK. They handle millions of transactions to fund and create ISAs. Moneybox have launched VRP (Variable Recurring Payments) through Plaid in order to optimise their customer flows and have more reliability in customer recurring payments. With our new flow, users can go through the journey once, set up their consent, and then money can move in the background. It’s like a card on file with a bank account. We see this as a significant trend in the coming years in the UK specifically, and then across Europe as that product set develops.”

What trends are you seeing across the FinTech landscape? What opportunities do you see for Plaid?

The UK has always been an early adopter of open banking but we’re now seeing a surge in demand from mainland Europe. We are currently live in 18 markets in Europe and continue to focus on our reliability and depth in each market to ensure we can meet that demand.

This year, we’ve learned more about how our customers want to use VRP (Variable Recurring Payments). In June, we launched Moneybox’s VRP proposition to enable them to relaunch their Payday Boost offering which was previously restricted by direct debit limitations. Every week we’re having more and more conversations on VRP use cases. 

We’re also excited about how open banking and fintech more broadly can help make financial access more inclusive. For example, open banking can help the underserved get more access to credit by using real-time data to inform underwriting decisions. At Plaid, we’ve built specific products to do this such as the Financial Insights Report that companies such as Capital on Tap are already using to inform their decisioning programmes.

And what’s next for Plaid? What future launches and initiatives are you particularly excited about?

“There are three areas I would highlight… First, pay by bank globally for Plaid. You look at Western Union, they’re probably not the first company to adopt something, but the second they adopt something it probably is about to hit mainstream. That’s significant volume. They’re one of the world’s oldest companies. They’ve been fantastic to work with. So, as that trust and familiarity start coming into play, people that aren’t Western Union come and say, okay, we’ve seen this experience. It was really good. We want it now. We’re working with our teams across the globe to bring that to life for North America and Europe in the simplest way possible. It’s really exciting.

“Second, we have the significant opportunity to bring lending into the 21st century. Particularly because of the third thing, which is the Plaid network. We’ve touched hundreds of millions of consumers. We’ve spent a long time building products to make payments easy and to make underwriting easy. And now we’re in the third phase… We have all of these users, this large network, so how can we make this even simpler for people? And just giving smoother experiences when the user is actually in the workflow. So, boosting conversion, delivering network style experiences in the same way that other network businesses do.”

Why Money20/20? What is it about this particular event that makes it the perfect place to showcase what you do? How has the response been to Plaid?

“This is my sixth straight Money20/20 and it gets busier every year! It’s great to learn more about the ecosystem at large. You can see developing trends each year, and it’s always a little bit different. You build relationships at Money20/20 that stay with you for the rest of your life. And it’s a perfect opportunity to meet people in the flesh that you might normally only see on screen. You can get a pretty direct read on what they’re working on and it’s exciting to be here making new connections.”