Part
01
of one
Part
01
Who are Plaid.com's three major competitors and how are they differentiated from product and brand positioning perspectives?
Hello! Thanks for your question about the competitive landscape of Plaid. The short version is that Yodlee is its biggest competitor in the field due to its size and similarities of products and services, followed by Finicity, Xiginite, and Kontomatik. Below you will find a deep dive of my findings.
METHODOLOGY
I consulted several lists of the top APIs from trusted media sources to get a sense of what the competitive landscape for this market looked like. I found that the company names that consistently came up in addition to Plaid’s were Yodlee, Xignite, Finicity, and Kontomatik. I then checked corporate websites, reviews, and the financial information for each company. My findings for each company are divided up below.
PLAID
Plaid provides the software that companies use to help customers manage their finances through third party mobile applications. According to their website, they focus on ‘democratizing financial services through technology ’. They brand themselves as offering simple solutions in elegant packages. They allow companies access to clean data without having to develop the programs themselves. Since they are able to offer products to a wide variety of companies, Plaid has a broad understanding of what is missing in the Fintech industry and is able to capitalize on that by sending out calls for ‘new start-ups’ and adding those new companies to their customer base. Plaid was founded in 2012 and seems to still be in the start-up phase. Their latest funding round produced $44 million and their revenue for 2016 was $3.5 million.
MAIN COMPETITORS
YODLEE (ENVESTNET)
Yodlee does much the same thing that Plaid does, but their API also has an added layer of security. Yodlee has direct access to banking data, unlike all the rest of the competitors on the market who must gather their information from websites. According to one source, their biggest leverage in the market is clean data- which Plaid also has access to. They also sell the data they collect, which their other competitors do not. It is also the most established of the companies and has just been acquired by Envestnet, a very large wealth management company. Yodlee and Plaid also just settled a patent case this year, which would suggest they are in direct competition. Yodlee, along with Finicity, is the oldest of all the API companies, having been founded 1999. Their latest funding round produced $75 million and they were acquired for $590 million in 2016. Their revenue in 2016 was $41,066,000.
XIGNITE
Xignite mostly markets itself to startups. Its unique asset is that it offers cloud API which makes it easier to integrate programs. It is almost as old as Yodlee as it was founded in 2000. The revenue data that was available for Xignite did not look reliable, but its latest funding round gathered $20.5 million.
FINICITY
Finicity brands itself as a leader in security. This company has ‘partnered with financial institutions, fellow aggregators, and Fintech app developers to create new standards for data access that will improve the security and consistency of data aggregation.’ Finicity has also been certified as a credit reporting agency. It was also founded 1999. The latest funding round for this company produced $42 million and its revenue for 2016 was $5.8 million.
KONTOMATIK
Kontomatik markets itself directly to banks, but it is useful for companies to use when performing credit checks on customers. This company allows banks to make their own interfaces for their customers. It offers a read only API for financial institutions and does not store any financial information on its servers. I was unable to find any financial information on this company. While this company might not be a direct competitor with Plaid, their name kept coming up in lists of the top APIs.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, Yodlee is the biggest competitor Plaid has by far. It is the largest company in this market and is in direct completion with Plaid. Xignite and Finicity are the next two big competitors followed by Kontomatik. Thanks for using Wonder! Please let us know if we can help with anything else!