Plaid Exchange Broadens Reach By Teaming Up With Jack Henry & Associates

Plaid recently announced that it will be partnering with Jack Henry & Associates to catalyze the availability of its open finance program Plaid Exchange. Under this agreement Plaid, which democratizes financial services through technology, will be making Plaid Exchange immediately accessible for financial institutions (FIs) on Jack Henry & Associates’ Banno Digital Platform.

California-based Plaid has been striving toward its goal of building the enabling infrastructure for financial services that provides secure and efficient ways to move financial data, reduce fraud, and create products and services that help consumers achieve transparency and control over personal financial information.

Since its founding by William Hockey and Zach Perret in 2012, the company has made much advancement toward this goal, resulting in the announcement earlier this year that Visa would buy the fintech for a reported $5.3 billion. Although the acquisition is being challenged by the DOJ, Plaid has continued to have a big year launching new products and services to help raise consumer confidence about their finances amid the pandemic.

Plaid Exchange was announced earlier this year to be the industry’s first open finance platform. With Plaid Exchange, banks, wealth managers, and fintech firms will be able to offer secure and reliable ways for clients to connect all their financial accounts to wealth management apps and services. Users will also be provided with tools to manage and monitor these connections. The service was created as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic when the company released its finding that 77% of Americans were anxious due to their financial situation amplified by the present economic downturn. Plaid Exchange is the company’s way of making a service available to seamlessly alleviate this burden.

Since the launch of Plaid Exchange, the fintech found that financial institutions lacked the technical support to implement their platform which gave rise to the collaboration with Jack Henry & Associates. Under this partnership, Jack Henry’s client base of 350 institutions will have “zero-lift” access to the Plaid network, broadening the program’s reach. At no extra cost to Banno clients, the integration will increase efficiency to participating financial institutions, providing more security and creating more reliable connections when consumers enable permissions between their financial accounts to Plaid-powered applications.

Speaking on this Niko Karvounis, Head of Products and Institutions at Plaid said, “Our partnership with Jack Henry helps us bring Plaid Exchange to hundreds of regional and community banks, and helps ensure millions of people can access digital finance apps and services no matter where they choose to bank, invest and manage their money.”