Plaid, once aimed primarily at fintechs, is expanding its corporate business and now has over 1,000 registered customers

As fintech services expand, Plaid has expanded its customer base.

Plaid started off as an organization that connected consumer bank accounts to financial apps, but has since expanded its offerings to incorporate lending, identity verification, credit reporting, fraud prevention and payments.

The 11-year-old company was almost acquired by Visa for $5 billion before antitrust regulators shut down the deal. Plaid raised financing at a valuation of $13.4 billion after the deal fell through and has since worked to diversify its revenue streams.

In its early days, the fintech giant mainly sold to other fintechs. Subsequently, more banks and financial institutions joined the motion. Today, the client base also includes large corporations trying to incorporate solutions into their offerings, including a mixture of established fintechs and incumbents resembling Venmo, SoFi, Chime, Rocket Money, H&R Block, Western Union, Affirm, Citi and Shopify.

It’s no surprise then that Plaid named Jennifer (Jen) Taylor as its first-ever CEO earlier this 12 months. Taylor has years of experience at larger corporations, most recently serving as chief product officer at Cloudflare. Before joining Cloudflare, Taylor held senior leadership positions at Salesforce, Facebook (now Meta), and Adobe, and spent two years as a enterprise capitalist.

“I have had the privilege of working at some very large companies that may not have been that big when I joined them. I was able to be part of efforts like moving from a single product to multiple products and from a single market segment to multiple market segments,” she told TechCrunch.

Plaid’s growth beyond fintech

This expansion right into a multi-product company has Plaid beginning to see real traction beyond its traditional fintech clients. In fact, the corporate says growth from enterprises and traditional financial institutions is beginning to outpace the remainder of its business.

Plaid has expanded its enterprise customer base to greater than 1,000, adding a whole lot of latest enterprise customers over the past 12 months, Taylor told TechCrunch exclusively. The company’s total variety of customers is 8,000.

“Our broader product suite of onboarding, payments, lending and fraud has opened doors to companies like RealPage, H&R Block and Western Union that weren’t considered a few years ago,” Taylor said. The goal, she added, is for Plaid to evolve right into a “one-stop shop” for its customers, offering a set of integrated products that address their broader business needs.

Meanwhile, product lines resembling identity, payments and credit are growing “five times faster” than its core account connectivity products, in accordance with the corporate. In fact, Plaid’s identity product is currently its fastest-growing product line, with over 50% of its customers being non-fintech customers.

“As our new products have gained traction, it’s helped Plaid expand into new markets where it hadn’t been before,” Kevin Young, Plaid’s head of product communications, said in an interview. “And as we develop new products, it’s pushed us into new market segments.”

The startup also acquires clients within the areas of proptech, real estate management, e-commerce and auto loans. For example, it now counts Zillow, Faire, Carvana and CarMax as customers.

Overall, the corporate claims to connect with 12,000 banks and financial institutions with 500 million connected accounts.

Why Plaid launched Layer, a new edition of its implementation

On June 18, she revealed her latest offering, Layera brand new product designed to unify “all key onboarding steps” for users – from identity verification to linking bank accounts – “into one secure and instant experience.”

Alain Meier, Plaid’s head of identity, says Layer can cut the time it takes to enroll in an app or service by 90%. In most cases, individuals who have already saved their details through Plaid when organising other accounts simply must enter their phone number and can complete tasks like full onboarding to use for a loan or fund their account “with just a few clicks.” Previous customers include Could Finance and Empower.

Meier compared the Layer experience to shopping on Amazon.

“When we are going to buy something, we usually default to using Amazon. Why are we doing this? Because we know our information will be safe. They already have our payment method. It will be extremely quick to check this and we know what to expect,” he said. “So we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could have the same type of experience and the same type of user experience that consumers choose?’”

Meier added that greater ease of implementation could potentially result in higher conversion rates for Plaid customers.

For Taylor, it is also a part of securing financial information in the approaching world where AI does more work. “The real impact is the differentiation it creates for our network and the products we build on top of it, including underwriting and payments.”

Plaid has been vocal about its plans to go public, even though it has not yet set a timeline. However, Taylor’s hiring, in addition to the hiring of a chief financial officer, hint at these plans.

The company’s technique to enter the corporate market is familiar as other large fintechs have also moved on this direction. Payments giant Stripe (each a partner and competitor of Plaid) has long been focused on entrepreneurship. Spend management startup Brex, while continuing to cater to startups, has also announced that it is trying to strengthen its corporate customer base.

The biggest query is how the corporate’s approach can be received by investors when it finally goes public.