The biggest product updates from Plaid Effects

New network-powered solutions across onboarding, credit, anti-fraud, and payments.

Jen Taylor
President, Plaid

Jen oversees all global business units across Plaid, building innovative financial solutions to help customers scale.

Earlier this morning at Plaid Effects, our annual customer conference, we shared new data and insights solutions designed to help you improve onboarding, underwriting, payments, and fraud and risk mitigation. The common thread across all of the solutions is that they are all built using unique data and insights from the Plaid network. 

The Plaid network connects consumers and financial institutions with thousands of digital financial apps and services. With nearly 500K connections to Plaid every day, we’re now able to enrich Plaid products with data and insights that don’t exist anywhere else today to both improve the user experience while better protecting against risk and fraud. 

Below is a recap of our biggest announcements. 

A new platform for secure, instant financial experiences

The Internet economy has dramatically changed consumer expectations. We have all come to expect everything to work almost instantaneously. And that includes having the ability to safely and securely sign up and use new digital financial solutions, quickly. Taking the combination of the Plaid network and our identity expertise, we’re bringing instant experiences to financial services with Plaid Layer. 

Layer powers instant financial experiences across onboarding, lending, payments, and more. With Layer, consumers can now safely and securely apply for a loan, fund their accounts, and pay their friends with just a few clicks on their phones. 

For this initial release, Layer accelerates onboarding by unifying all the critical steps – from identity verification to bank account linking – into one secure, instant experience. Companies like Possible Finance and Empower are now live with Layer and seeing meaningful conversion improvements. 

Cash flow underwriting solution with unique insights on credit risk

Consumer finances are becoming increasingly complex, and businesses need more actionable data and insights to help make confident credit decisions. That’s why we announced a new underwriting solution – Consumer Report under Plaid’s new consumer reporting agency, Plaid Check. Consumer Report brings real-time, actionable cash flow data along with network-powered credit risk insights to mainstream lending. 

With the Consumer Report, consumers can now tell the story of their financial lives beyond what’s on traditional credit reports. Lenders, property managers, and buy-now-pay-later providers can augment their existing credit models by incorporating bank account data and insights to help expand their pool of borrowers without adding more risk. We’re also testing and developing hundreds of attributes looking at account connection activity across the Plaid Network to help businesses better assess credit risk. Our early customers include enterprises like H&R Block and lenders like Oportun.

Account-level insights to fight fraud during onboarding

In the past year alone, we’ve seen a 40% increase in attempted identity fraud, and that number continues to increase. For any individual fintech company, it’s difficult to assess the risk of a new user. You have limited access to data on the user’s history and interactions with other apps and services. Last year, we launched Beacon, an anti-fraud intelligence network that enables fintechs and financial institutions to securely share fraud insights while protecting consumers from potential fraud. 

Now, we’ve added bank account insights, providing companies with 40+ insights about the linked account to determine the risk of downstream fraud. This can be used at the time of onboarding, helping to prevent fraud before losses occur. We can provide unique insights into the potential for fraud, powered by Plaid’s network of more than 500 million connected accounts, and can strengthen defenses against stolen identities, synthetic accounts, and account takeovers (ATO). 

Modular experiences designed to bring pay by bank to your checkout

US merchants spent more than $90 billion in swipe fees in the last year alone. That’s why businesses around the world are looking at ways to bring more cost-effective methods to payments while providing consumers with more choices.

We announced two new ways businesses can take advantage of Plaid’s modular pay-by-bank components, which are helping lower payments cost by 40%. First is our context-aware embedded checkout, which brings Plaid’s network-powered account-linking experience within the checkout. Users can immediately search for an institution or even experience rewards when they choose to pay by bank. The embedded checkout experience is ideal for bill pay use cases, but we’re seeing growing interest in high-value purchases, subscriptions, and more.

The other option is the dynamic checkout button, built with the same context-aware capabilities, but in the form of a button in checkout. This button contains everything a user needs to know, including their last linked bank account from the Plaid network for supported institutions or other relevant copy. The dynamic button is ideal for commerce use cases, like high-value purchases. Learn more about Plaid’s pay by bank solutions. 

A network built for you

Your feedback drives our roadmap and how we continue to bring network-powered solutions to help you solve even more of your challenges. Send us a note here.

Watch Plaid Effects on-demand here. 

See you next year!