Zach Perret
Background
Zach Perret grew up in Jacksonville, Florida and studied chemistry and biology at Duke University, graduating magna cum laude. A brilliant analytical thinker, Perret worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company in Atlanta and San Francisco, where he specialized in financial services technology.
Role at Plaid Inc.
Zach Perret is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Plaid Inc. While working at Bain, Perret partnered with William Hockey to build consumer financial software, discovering firsthand that connecting to American banks was nearly impossible. In 2013, Perret and Hockey founded Plaid in San Francisco to solve this fundamental infrastructure bottleneck. Under Perret's visionary, resolute leadership, Plaid survived a brutal DOJ antitrust challenge that scuttled its $5.3B sale to Visa, emerging as an independent $13.4 billion technology titan generating over $300 million in annual revenue. Perret is widely recognized as the defining architect of the American open banking movement. Perret's resolute, strategic leadership made him the defining corporate statesman of the American open banking movement. Surviving a high-stakes DOJ antitrust trial and the dramatic cancellation of the $5.3B Visa merger, Perret rallied Plaid to independent greatness, doubling its valuation to $13.4 billion, championing consumer financial data rights under CFPB Section 1033, and scaling Plaid past $300M ARR ahead of an initial public offering.