rewrite this title Plaid Partners with ClearBank; Announces AI-Enabled Transaction Categorization – Finovate

Financial data network Plaid and real-time clearing and embedded banking enabler ClearBank announced a new partnership this week.

The partnership will enable Plaid to leverage ClearBank’s virtual accounts and UK Faster Payments Service (FPS) access to enhance the sending, receiving, and reconciling of open banking payments.

Founded in 2013, Plaid has been a Finovate alum since its debut at our developers conference, FinDeVR Silicon Valley 2014.

A new partnership between ClearBank and Plaid will deliver faster, more secure, and friction-free Pay by Bank experiences for both businesses and customers throughout the UK. Courtesy of the collaboration, ClearBank‘s virtual accounts and direct access to the UK Faster Payments Service (FPS) will enable Plaid to enhance the sending, receiving, and reconciling of open banking payments. This includes making it easier for companies to match incoming payments to specific users or transactions, enhancing the reconciliation process and reducing reliance on manual effort.

“ClearBank and Plaid share a commitment to modernizing financial services through transparency, security, and innovation,” ClearBank Group Chief Executive Officer Mark Fairless said. “By combining ClearBank’s cloud-native infrastructure with Plaid’s open banking connectivity, we’re unlocking potential for businesses to deliver faster, more reliable, and secure payment experiences.”

An enabler of real-time clearing and embedded banking, ClearBank will provide a regulated, real-time, cloud-native infrastructure that will benefit consumers with faster, more predictable bank payments. The partnership will enable Plaid to offer faster, more reliable pay-ins and payouts that will empower companies to provide better customer experiences at checkout and during account funding.

“Pay by Bank is no longer a niche option,” Plaid Head of Product, Europe, Zak Lambert said. “Adoption is rising quickly, especially among younger consumers who expect instant, secure, and low-friction ways to pay. To meet that demand, businesses need reliable real-time payment infrastructure. ClearBank’s technology helps Plaid deliver instant, secure, and cost-efficient bank payments so companies can better serve their customers’ needs.”

Plaid’s partnership announcement with ClearBank comes as Plaid announced a new AI-enhanced transaction categorization capability that delivers up to 10% greater accuracy on primary categories and 20% greater accuracy on detailed sub-categories. The result is fewer missed transactions and more accurate data labeling. In addition to AI-assisted label generation and targeted human review, Plaid also noted that it would deploy an expanded category taxonomy with more than a dozen new subcategories to help differentiate income types, repayments, disbursements, bank fees, and transfers.

A Finovate alum for more than a decade, Plaid made its Finovate debut at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2014. Today, the San Francisco-based fintech offers a data network that covers more than 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe, making it easier for people to connect their financial accounts to the products and services they want. Plaid works with thousands of companies, including Fortune 500 firms and many of the world’s largest banks.

Plaid was founded in 2013. Co-founder Zack Perret is CEO.

Photo by Tim Bish on Unsplash

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