• Plaid, a diversified FinTech infrastructure provider, has launched a “Pay-by-bank” infrastructure product, enabling the US and European merchants to accept payments directly from user bank accounts.  

• Plaid connects user bank accounts with the FinTech apps but will not be directly involved in transferring money from the bank accounts. Instead, it has signed up more than 50 partners across the US and Europe (such as Square, Stripe, Silicon Valley Bank, and Galileo) to do so. 

• Plaid says that the pay-by-bank option will be used mainly for payments that do not typically use payment cards (such as remittances and invoice payments) and would, therefore, complement card payments instead of replacing them. 

<ul><li> Analyst QuickTake: Plaid has had plans to expand its payment offerings in 2021, and this was also cited as a reason for the Department of Justice to prevent Visa from acquiring it (in January 2021) as it was alleged that Visa was attempting to eliminate a potential rival. Moreover, the pay-by-bank solution and complementing partnerships seem to be an extension to Plaid’s partnership with Square (entered into five months ago ), which similarly enabled US merchants to  accept direct payments through user bank accounts (through ACH transactions) using Square’s SDK.</ul>