TechCrunch
Plaid today announced that it has named Meta veteran John Anderson to serve as its new head of payments.
The fintech startup has slowly been evolving its offerings beyond its core product of account linking. Earlier this year, it moved into identity and income verification. Payments feels like a natural evolution of its business.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Anderson explained that while Plaid will be personally facilitating payments through its Transfer offering, it will also continue working with its dozens of payments partners, which include the likes of Square, Stripe, Marqeta, Gusto and Silicon Valley Bank. Its end goal is to generally give consumers more choice when it comes to bank payments.
“There has been so much innovation on POS [point of sale] in the last 10 years, but purely digital — no physical interaction — experiences for payments is still nascent,” he said. “This is where we are focused.”
In its own way, Anderson pointed out, Plaid has been involved in digital payments for years, by enabling nearly a billion ACH transactions for things like account funding and account-to-account transfers. Along the way, the company partnered with nearly 50 payments companies.
In other words, Plaid has its services for clients that range from account verification to risk assessment and processing. It also has built its data products to be modular with the goal of “maximizing choice” for its customers and “ultimately expanding the use of bank payments.”
“This time last year, same-day ACH grew by nearly 75% year over year with numbers in the trillions — that’s a lot of growth for an already sizable number,” Anderson said. “There is a lot of market for many players and overall Plaid works with a broad network of payment partners. We plan to invest — not shift — in that ecosystem and strategy.”
So generally, when it comes to payments, Anderson said, Plaid is focused on building products that help companies have “more cost-effective, efficient and flexible bank payments.”