Fintech

Marqeta and Plaid are teaming up. It’s a sign that fintech is maturing.

Two companies known for powering other startups are giving each other a boost.

Plaid and Marqeta logos

Plaid and Marqeta both support other fintechs. Now they're the ones teaming up.

Image: Protocol

Marqeta and Plaid are making it easier for consumers to authenticate bank accounts and move funds between them, the first official product partnership between two fintech trailblazers that already share some business customers.

Marqeta, which issues cards for companies like Block and Uber, will use Plaid’s data-aggregation software to enable faster ACH transactions and account verification for Marqeta cardholders, the company said Tuesday.

“The way that's done in the past is you have to verify your external bank accounts via microdeposits, and that takes a lot of time,” Marqeta Chief Operating Officer Vidya Peters told Protocol. “With the Plaid integration, it would just be a few clicks.”

Plaid COO Eric Sager said the partnership means removing a major pain point for consumers: “In order to fund the wallet, which then funds a card, they have to go through a daylong or a weeklong micro-deposit flow. They want to go through seamless flow,” he told Protocol.

Founded in 2010, Marqeta became the fintech force behind a lot of famous names, including Square (now Block), Coinbase and Uber. It even has JPMorgan Chase — a big card-issuer in its own right — as a customer. The company, which went public in June 2021, has seen its stock price slide since its IPO. But news of the Plaid partnership appeared to give its share a lift, gaining nearly 9% in Tuesday’s trading.

Marqeta COO Vidya Peters and Plaid COO Eric Sager.Marqeta COO Vidya Peters and Plaid COO Eric Sager.Photo: Marqeta, Plaid

Plaid, which was founded in 2013, emerged as a fintech powerhouse through data-aggregation technology that gave many startups unprecedentedly easy tools to access consumer data.

Their alliance underlines the rapid expansion of fintech, said Alex Johnson, director of Fintech Research at Cornerstone Advisors.

“It’s a timing and market maturity thing,” he told Protocol. “We are just now reaching the stage where there are multiple, mature layers of fintech infrastructure in place to help new companies quickly spin up new financial experiences.”

The alliance benefits both companies, he said. It would give Marqeta access to a “more robust set of APIs for card issuing.” The partnership also means Plaid will have the ability to “embed” its technology in other fintech infrastructure providers’ products, Johnson said. The partnership could mean prospective customers will ask, “Which card issuing or banking-as-a-service platform should we use?” instead of “Which data aggregation service should we use?” which could mean “a broader base of potential fintech developers that they can reach.”

Given the growth of fintech, partnerships like the one Marqeta and Plaid just formed will “become much more common over the next couple of years, followed, in many cases, by acquisitions,” Johnson said.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins