Background
Plaid is on a mission to democratize financial services. Specifically, Plaid builds the digital infrastructure that allows apps and other service platforms to connect to consumers’ bank accounts, enabling things like digital peer-to-peer payments (Venmo), budgeting tools (Qapital), and fast, secure lending (Ellie Mae). To date, more than 25 percent of Americans have connected a bank account to at least one app or service platform using Plaid.
In 2020, Plaid was acquired by Visa for $5.3 billion. Both before and after the acquisition, they have faced an important challenge: how to communicate their value proposition to a wide range of prospective customers. They knew their technology could significantly improve security and user experience for their clients, but they needed a way to prove those assertions during the sales process. Although Plaid was growing quickly, they did not have the bandwidth to develop a solution in-house.