Plaid Inc.

Okay, now for a very quick look at stories we didn't have time to cover in full.

This one comes from FF News with the headline, Meta launches Muse AI agent with Plaid integration.

So Meta has launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can connect to users' financial accounts through Plaid.

Users can choose to give Muse access to information including balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities, allowing it to provide personalized financial guidance.

The agent can use that information to help with tasks such as adjusting budgets, identifying subscriptions, and managing debt alongside non-financial areas including productivity, health, and shopping.

The service is initially focused on the US, where Plaid connects to more than 12,000 financial institutions and apps.

Users must explicitly opt into connecting their financial accounts and can manage or revoke those connections through Plaid.

Jason, the show notes say Ross to share thoughts, but given the focus on the US and obviously your promotion to co-host, I'm going to defer to your expert knowledge of the market.

And so from, again, the Gusto use case, it is effectively I'm funding from my Gusto account.

I log into my, say, my Robinhood account and And effectively, what we're doing on the back end is we're pulling, okay, what chains does Robinhood accept? What is the alphanumeric address? We automatically pull that in from behind the scenes in a very Plaid-like experience, and the money moves.

And so from the customer experience perspective, it's seamless.

It's an account-to-account movement.

You know, my address will be cat cat unicorn robot.

That'll be fine.

The other kind of thing that stuck out of what you said is, you know, you compared yourself to Plaid, which is really interesting.

Plaid and data aggregation are sort of some of the first, I mean, not the first, but like second generation embedded finance stuff.

Visa gains an early role in defining those standards, while Revolut gains a practical test case for A-enabled commerce on existing card rails.

Next, Grok has connected to Plaid to access financial data from US users.

The integration illustrates how AI assistants are beginning to move from answering questions about money to interacting with underlying financial accounts.

Account aggregation can support personal finance, transaction analysis, and eventually more automated financial actions, but the strategic issue is permissioning.

We have seen over the last six to 12 months, a ramp up on deepfakes, on fake documents, because that technology is so accessible right now.

One in two Americans have connected an account with Plaid.

Let's say an agent wants to automatically make trades for you on a brokerage platform.

What if an agent wants to automatically sweep funds from a checking account to a savings account to come up with an optimal interest rate? People are coming and saying,

Like it's an endless game of chess.

Welcome back to the Payment Shed podcast, live from New York City.

We are joined this morning by Brian DeMere, Head of Payments and Financial Management at Plaid, and Pedro Sanzavo, Head of Fraud at Plaid.

Guys, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

It is retained, and it is reachable by law enforcement without a warrant.

Next is the Plaid layer.

Plaid is middleware.

It is the infrastructure that connects your bank account to the hundreds of fintech apps, the budgeting tools, the investment apps, and the payment platforms that ask you to connect your bank account.

When you see a bank login screen inside of a third-party app, you're usually looking at Plaid.

Here is what Plaid accesses when you connect.

Your complete transaction history, account balances, account numbers, routing numbers, and in many cases, full identity information.

The access is granted through the app that you're signing up for, but Plaid is the entity that actually receives the data.

So moving to step five, linking your bank.

You do this through a system called Plaid.

And I want to pause here because this is where I and a lot of people just panic.

The app literally asks you to type your bank username and password into their prompt.

They absolutely do not.

Our source from IronVest does a fantastic job explaining this.

Plaid is just an intermediary.

Venmo, Chime, they all use it.

So my name is Rory O'Reilly, co-founder and CEO of Knot.

And Knot is kind of like Finicity or Plaid, but for merchant connectivity.

We sell software to banks like Cash App, Venmo, PayPal.

And as soon as you sign up for those challenger banks, you're instantly in Knot software.

And this guy, Brian Costello, is amazing.

He's world renowned in the community.

He was the CISO at Yodlee, which was a Finicity slash Plaid competitor for a decade.

And he was one of our very first hires because we knew that if you get security wrong, not only are you screwed, but your customers are screwed too.

Melio, a Xero company, has launched Melio Expense Management for small and midsize businesses.

Personetics and Plaid partner on open finance data.

Personetics has partnered with Plaid to combine open finance connectivity with AI-driven personalization for banks and credit unions.

Flagstar Bank selects Fiserv's Phoenix Act core banking platform.

Flagstar Bank has selected Fiserv's FinEx Act platform to serve as the foundation of its core banking modernization strategy.