Plaid’s going Dutch

In North America and around the world, Going Dutch is traditionally characterised as splitting the bill between a group of diners – something that, by the way, is turning into a global habit when looking at the success of services like Venmo in the US with innovations that easily let people pay their share. Plaid’s footprint has also grown in the EU, with services like Sage connected to Plaid in Ireland, lending tool Wayflyer using Plaid across the EU and Receiptbank in France, which relies on Plaid to surface SME invoices.

That’s not the definition of Going Dutch we’re looking for here though – as Plaid scales up our office in Amsterdam, going Dutch has come to mean something completely different to us. It means building on and learning from a well-established fintech ecosystem, empowering Europeans with access to their own financial data, and building better digital financial services ecosystem across the world.

Advances aside, more can be done. According to a survey conducted by the Dutch Central Bank, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), in 2020, a quarter of the Dutch consumers authorised the use of their payment data during the past 12 months. While this is welcome news for Open Banking providers, according to the same survey a large proportion of Dutch consumers have not yet been offered new services by their banks, nor by other parties. People have little incentive to share data if they are not being offered a compelling reason to do so.

Well versed in showcasing the value of consumer permissioned data sharing, Plaid helps innovators build on top of open banking infrastructure and powers over 4,000+ fintech applications globally, enabling a range of use cases from supporting renters in the housing market to embedded financial applications.

Plaid powers modern digital financial services.

The EU’s moves towards open finance - a world where consumers are empowered by access to all their financial data - giving them greater control over their own financial lives, will also help to develop new and meaningful consumer use cases across the EU.

Next to enriching financial experiences and decision making, Plaid is well aligned with other results seen in the DNB survey. The survey shows that safe handling of personal data is an important priority for Dutch consumers. At Plaid, data protection is at the heart of everything we do, security transparency and control are key principles that lead the design and development of our data protection standards. We are fully compliant with the GDPR and PSD2.

Europe has strong regulation on privacy and data governance under the GDPR and regulates access to consumer financial data through PSD2. Plaid is committed to the principles of data security, user autonomy and the protection of privacy – mirroring the core responsibilities of financial services providers in the European Union.

As Plaid continues to grow its Dutch and European presence – we open our doors to ecosystem partners and invite meaningful dialogue with the industry at large through ongoing and constructive public-private partnerships.

Don’t just take our word for it though – read the Forrester Report.