Plaid

Plaid connects applications to consumer bank accounts and sells the products built on that connection: Transfer for ACH, RTP and FedNow payments, Signal for ACH payment risk, Identity Verification and Beacon for anti-fraud, Monitor for anti money laundering screening, Transactions for up to 24 months of categorised data, Investments, Liabilities, Enrich, and credit underwriting through Income and LendScore.

The connection itself has become the least interesting part of the business, and that is the point. Reaching a bank account is now close to a commodity, with open banking rules mandating it in several markets, so the durable value sits in what the data enables: deciding whether a payment will bounce, whether a person is who they claim, and whether they can repay.

Signal is the clearest example. Knowing an account exists is a yes or no question; predicting whether an ACH debit will return unpaid requires a model trained across many institutions, which only a network with Plaid's coverage can build. That is a moat the connection alone never provided.

Categorising transactions is deceptively hard for the same reason, because merchant descriptors are inconsistent across banks and a personal finance application built on raw strings produces nonsense.