Plaid Scales its Business with Faster Payments

Plaid: unlocking financial freedom  

Plaid is a global data network and platform that powers the tools millions of people rely on to live healthier financial lives. By building API connectivity via COS, Plaid makes it easy for businesses and consumers to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they use. Its platform helps power services for bank payments, cashflow lending, customer onboarding and fraud prevention.  

The opportunity: a wider reach for financial security tools  

From their start, Plaid built API technology that could be easily integrated into apps and services for account verification and open banking -- necessary tools for secure money movement. This directly benefited smaller banks across the country, who often operate on the backs of legacy systems and lack the infrastructure to be able to embed and offer open banking to their customers.  

To widen the reach and democratize safe and secure transaction protocols, Plaid partnered with Cross River to enable account verification by leveraging an alternative method: instant microdeposits. The differentiating experience? Faster and more accurate verification with faster payments.  

While Plaid’s microdeposits program has allowed customers to receive verifications in 2-3 hours via same-day ACH, the program has continued to evolve since its inception in 2018. Today, Plaid powers instant account verification for its users via RTP® and FedNow® for more immediate access to funds. By collaborating with an omni-solution, multi-rail, API-driven bank like Cross River, Plaid helps consumers interact in transparent data flows and access tools that would otherwise have limited reach.  

The scalability factor with Cross River’s Operating System

As Plaid continued to expand its offerings, Cross River’s Operating System (COS) proved to be the logical fit to scale with. By connecting to COS, Plaid leveraged COS’ centralized suite of payment rail APIs across ACH, wires, RTP®, and FedNow® to power Plaid Transfer, a full-service funds transfer solution for payers and recipients within the US.

Use cases:  

• Gig economy  
• Payroll  
• SMB  
• Bank processing

Results: an evolving partnership to address customer challenges

Plaid’s partnership with Cross River is part of a shift in the traditional bank-fintech model, where expectations for a forward-thinking bank, with technology driven operations and products, are increasingly becoming the norm. Partnerships like this are successful by driving impact for a growing number of companies and are structured nimbly to address new challenges. Plaid’s partnership with Cross River serves as an example of innovative technologies leveraging quicker payment processes to propel greater access of core features, in this case, account verification and beyond. Through a centralized system like Cross River’s Operating System, fintechs like Plaid continue to offer a diverse pool of customers the right tools to lead the next generation of financial services.