Following its eyebrow-raising acquisition of Quovo, Plaid revealed Thursday what it has been working on with the tech and team of Quovo. The company announced its Investments API, a tool that provides data on account balances, holdings and transactions, according to the firm.
The new product provides “a detailed profile of the holdings in an account” and “insight into transactions,” either individually or in tandem, according to Jesse Dhillon and Derlen Chiu, product managers at Plaid. “With connectivity to investment accounts, Plaid can serve a whole new set of use cases to enable developers, technology platforms, and financial institutions to deliver more insightful and compelling products,” they noted. With a nod to the financial advisors and vendors who relied on Quovo when it was a stand-alone company, Plaid said the new tool will allow advisors “robo or human” to provide “more holistic” advice and better projections.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Lowell Putnam, head of partnerships at Plaid and former CEO and co-founder of Quovo, said that “the origins of the product” came from the company he co-founded. “We realized that we have the opportunity to bring Quovo’s investment data expertise into the Plaid API stack,” he added. Those developments were accelerated by the acquisition.
The product provides connectivity for 19 different account types, including a dozen types of retirement accounts as well as 529s, stock plans and HSAs.