CUSTOMER: GEMINI

Founded in 2014 and trusted in over 70 countries, Gemini is an exchange for trading, storing, and earning crypto. In this conversation, Director of Engineering Andrew Fuller discusses the company’s mission to expand financial freedom and how thoughtful onboarding plays a critical role in building trust. Keep reading to learn more about what’s next for Gemini and the crypto ecosystem at large.

Plaid: Tell us about Gemini’s mission.

Andrew: Gemini's mission is to unlock the next era of creative, personal, and financial freedom.
We want everyone to be able to easily access crypto, whether it's using our credit card to earn crypto, or with advanced trading strategies on our exchange.

Plaid: You mentioned the Gemini Credit Card. What’s that?

Andrew: It works like a traditional card, but instead of points, you get crypto back. So you're able to spend at a restaurant, out on a date, and get 3% back in the reward of your choice. If I'm earning Bitcoin and its value goes up tomorrow, I'm now invested in Bitcoin—just by spending the same way that I would've every day.

There's a lot of people who are interested in crypto, but don't know where to get started or don't want to put a lot of money into it. A big part of why we built out the Gemini Credit Card was to make crypto more accessible.

Plaid: Gemini’s invested a lot into improving onboarding. What role does better onboarding play in making crypto more accessible?

Andrew: When people are signing up for something, they don't want to have to go through a complex process just to be able to get started. We want our users to be able to get on our exchange in less than a minute, get engaged, and be able to buy crypto right away. 

From the early days of Gemini, we’ve used Plaid to help customers easily link their bank accounts. More recently, we’ve started using Plaid Layer to help make our onboarding process even faster. 

Layer allows us to combine identity data collection and bank linking in one easy step. When Gemini customers onboard using Layer, they convert at a much higher rate, get more value faster, and have much higher satisfaction.
A smooth, secure onboarding experience shows you're thinking through every aspect of the user experience and it helps build trust with your customers.

Plaid: Tell us more about Gemini’s philosophy around building trust.

Andrew: Our mantra is asking permission, not forgiveness. We see that play out day to day, both in how we think about building user trust—making a secure product, a fast product, something that people can really trust with their money—but also when it comes to working with regulators and how we build our exchange.

We aim to build long-term trust within governments and other countries, making sure that we can actually have crypto as a global asset class, not just an investment on the side, but the actual foundation of the financial infrastructure.

A big part of how we think about building, and the partners that we work with, is building out trusted experiences together. And partners like Plaid help us build trusted experiences at scale.

Trust is important today, but we believe it’ll be increasingly important as crypto becomes the base layer of the financial ecosystem.

Plaid: Crypto attracts a wide range of users. How do you think about building products that work for all of them?

Andrew: One of the great parts about crypto is that there are so many ways to engage in it. You can be a power-user who only keeps things on a hardware wallet, or you could be engaging with crypto and not even realize it.
Being able to cater to all those different user types and build trust with them is one of the things that we're really focused on. We want our product to continue to expand across all the different crypto use cases.