Most people meet Plaid as a pop-up asking them to pick their bank while signing up for Venmo, Robinhood or a lending app. Behind that screen, Plaid confirms account and routing numbers, checks balances, pulls transaction history and screens for fraud, so apps do not need their own links to thousands of banks. The same network now supports lending decisions and bank-to-bank payments. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Plaid was founded in 2013 in San Francisco, California, by Zach Perret and William Hockey to build the foundational API infrastructure connecting consumer bank accounts to modern fintech applications, powering financial connectivity for thousands of digital services.
Plaid sells API access to businesses, not consumers. Apps pay usage-based or subscription fees when they verify an account (Auth), check a balance, pull transactions, verify income or identity, score fraud or ACH return risk (Signal, Beacon, Protect), or move money between bank accounts (Transfer and pay-by-bank). Larger customers sign platform contracts covering several products. Plaid also pays some large banks for API data access under bilateral agreements, which is a cost line rather than a revenue line.