Wells Fargo has reached an agreement with Plaid to give the bank's customers the ability to share their financial data with a host of fintech firms.
As consumers increasingly look to share their bank data with third party apps, Plaid has grown into a multi-billion dollar company in just a few years. Recently it emerged that Visa and Mastercard both joined a $250 million Series C funding round for the company.
Now, it has teamed up with Wells Fargo, giving the bank's customers greater control over the account information they share with Plaid-supported third parties, including the ability to turn on or off data sharing through the Wells app.
The API used in the agreement will use a tokenised “handshake” between the companies’ servers through which customers’ financial data will be shared. The service will be available to some customers "within a year".
“We want to be where our customers are,” says Ben Soccorsy, head, digital payments, Wells Fargo Virtual Channels. “And if customers want to share their Wells Fargo account information with a Plaid-supported app to help them better manage their finances, we want to enable them to do so seamlessly and more securely."