CUSTOMER Q&A: POSITIVE FINANCE

Positive Finance is an impact investing platform that enables employees to save more money and donate a portion of their paycheck to nonprofits. As a Certified B Corp, Positive Finance is dedicated to making a difference in the climate and environment and wants to enable people to take action. 

To connect people’s bank accounts and payroll providers to charitable causes, Positive Finance needed a partner who could help them access thousands of financial institutions across the US. They also needed to understand their customers’ financial outlook, cash flow, and fraud risk. For all of that, they turned to Plaid. 

In this interview from Plaid Effects, we speak with Fabien Lamaison, Co-Founder and CEO of Positive Finance, about how the company enables people to make an impact through their paychecks. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Plaid: Tell us about Positive Finance and how that idea came to be. 

Lamaison: Positive Finance is an impact finance platform for businesses and their employees. We help businesses achieve sustainability goals and boost employee retention. With our app, employees can save and donate. In the future, they will be able to invest in social and climate impact funds.

We want to democratize philanthropy and impact investing in the workplace. 

Plaid: That sounds amazing. What inspired the founding of your company, and what mission drives your business today?

Lamaison: What inspired me to create a company is that I sometimes hear that impact investments or donations are risky. We don't really know what the impact is. But when you think about it, it's actually the opposite.

Not doing anything is riskier because climate change is a reality. If the planet is dying, populations are displaced because of disasters, so not doing anything is dangerous. We need to look at more than profits and return on investments. We also need to consider people and the planet because they go hand in hand.

Plaid: Why did you choose Plaid to help start your business?

Lamaison: We chose Plaid because of its coverage of US financial institutions. This coverage is critical for our work because we want people to easily connect their funding sources to our app.

We need to be able to help people allocate a portion of their payroll so that they can make an impact. Plaid’s ease of use was critical for what we wanted to do. During onboarding, we worked with the Plaid team and gathered many business and tech insights, which made it super easy. Also, because we are a B Corp, they connected us to the impact team at Plaid, and we really appreciated the alignment on the mission.

Plaid: How do you see your business growing in the next five years? How can Plaid support that growth? 

Lamaison: In the next five years, we want to open in new geographies worldwide, and there is no better partner than Plaid to do that efficiently. We also want to leverage more data and intelligence to do customer matchmaking so that they can discover causes to support. We’d like to automate giving and impact investing and bring causes to our customers based on their preferences and lifestyles. Plaid’s products, like Transactions, can help us do that and much more.