Image Credits:<\/strong> Plaid<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Beacon is now available to fintechs and financial institutions of all sizes and Plaid\u2019s 8,000+ customers. A business will pay Plaid to become a member of the network.<\/span><\/p>\n

The goal of the new offering is twofold, according to Meier.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne, it\u2019s<\/span> to help the businesses to more efficiently and accurately find fraud that\u2019s going on in their systems and to stop it from having this chain reaction of moving between different fintechs,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then, secondarily, we also want to give consumers a mechanism by which they\u2019re able to protect their identities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It is also significant, in Plaid\u2019s view, considering that regulators are giving increased scrutiny to fintechs, in an effort to make sure that they\u2019re \u201cadhering to the same levels of security and compliance that the banks have for many years.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Plaid spent about a year building out the product, which Meier acknowledged was \u201ca very hard product to launch.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When it comes to mitigating its own risk, Plaid says that it is<\/span> operating the network with the same goal of securing sensitive information in the same way it works to secure financial account data. Beacon, it says, does not share personal identifiable information back to participating companies, only whether the identity information they are screening has been associated with fraud on other platforms. The company also emphasizes that is not used for decisioning, noting that \u201cwhat Beacon does is offer customers an additional layer of fraud intelligence that customers can then use to do step up verifications or other security checks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The company also last week announced a new feature called Remember Me, which allows a user who has completed verification of their identity to opt in and have their identity remembered the next time they are asked for verification.<\/span><\/p>\n