Powering the next generation of digital finance

Jennifer Taylor has been president of Plaid since February. She was previously chief product officer at Cloudflare and held various senior management roles at Salesforce. She participated in a fireside chat at Semafor's Banking on the Future event in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, discussing her role and company priorities with moderator Jennifer Kuperman, chief commercial officer at Chime.

Below are some excerpts of that conversation, the video for which can be viewed on Semafor’s conference website. Comments have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

You’re five months into a new job at Plaid as president of the company. You're hot off your customer conference. Tell us what's going on? What are you thinking about? What are you learning about?

At Plaid, we power the digital financial ecosystem. Our infrastructure enables individuals to connect their financial accounts to digital finance. So we provide the services, for example, that enable you to connect your bank account to Venmo in a simple and easy way. 

There's no better way to start a new job than diving in and spending time with your customers. [The conference] was a wonderful opportunity and privilege to have time to talk with customers and consumers. It comes back to choice and control time and time again, and our responsibility to unlock that in ways that are easy and safe for them and for the services they rely on.

You spent the majority of your career in tech. So now talk about this transition to fintech.

I've been working in tech pretty much my entire career. But most recently, I was the chief product officer at CloudFlare, where we focus on creating and building a network, and creating connectivity and security for cloud services. It's been phenomenal to roll that forward into fintech, because it feels to me there two things I'm able to bring with me: The first is the importance of building out and being a steward of that underlying network connectivity, but then the other is really understanding how important and how dynamic security is in this environment.

You recently released a survey called The Fintech Effect which looks at how consumers are using and benefiting from financial services and financial tools. So can you share some of the insights you learned from that?

First and foremost, it came out with the sentiment that fintech is here, and it's here to stay. If you just look at the rate of adoption and use of fintech applications by consumers, it's increasingly growing. Eight in ten Americans engage with and connect to at least one fintech app or  service in their daily lives. It just gives you a sense of what that adoption is. What was really meaningful to me was seeing that the adoption of these services has really become more equitable across different socioeconomic and demographic groups. You're seeing people from all walks of life really embrace fintech for how they engage, whether it's managing your stock portfolio or using a fintech app to connect with and apply for affordable housing. It's been phenomenal to me to see that depth of integration. The final thing from the survey was the sentiment of growing trust in fintechs and the security of the system. 

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra talked about open banking and the importance of the open banking rule [under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act]. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it relates to Plaid?

We’re really excited about open banking, and we're also excited about 1033 and what that will mean for consumers. We've been advocates of open banking since our inception. At the core of it, we believe open banking gives consumers more control and choice over how they manage their financial lives, and creates an ecosystem around them that has a high level of responsibility and accountability. We're really excited to see it come into law.

We're excited to see things like API Standards…things that I grew up with in my prior roles in the web standards community really coming to the forefront to enable that connectivity in a way that is more seamless and will allow us to continue to expand the universe of services that can connect. We think open banking is just the beginning. Open banking is the first step towards open finance. We fundamentally believe that more and more of consumers’ financial lives, and the financial interactions that they're going to have, are going to come online. We do fundamentally believe that every company will become a fintech company. But at the end of the day, what does that mean? It means they're integrating digital banking services into their platform to enable their customers to transact more securely and more easily.

I think there's more that we can do. I think the future here is really forged by bringing together diverse groups of people. Technologists, policymakers, customers, financial institutions, consumers are really enabling us to think about how we continue to innovate, create the right balance for the consumer and continue to hold the consumer at the forefront of choice and control.

What do you see as the financial services industry’s role in ensuring safety and security overall?

It's all hands on deck. You really have seen the opportunity for technologists, for financial institutions, for policymakers, for consumers to come around the table and have a robust dialogue of ‘What is the problem we're trying to solve together here, and how do we roll up our sleeves?’ Plaid is acting on this. 

On Tuesday, Taylor spoke at the Aspen Institute Digital Identity Forum where she discussed Plaid’s effort to enhance security and fight fraught across digital finance. She spoke about Plaid’s anti-fraud network Beacon and their identity verification tools, as well as broader industry efforts needed.