Building an AI-Native Finance Team with Plaid CFO Seun Sodipo

**CJ Gustafson** (0:00)
I'm reflecting on my experiences using AI, and now I'm so impatient in terms of why isn't it fast enough?

**Seun Sodipo** (0:05)
You have that experience in one part of your life, and you port it over to your expectations in every other part of your life. Once you're digital, it's like, okay, then, what's the cutting edge experience? And so we're really excited about intelligent financial experiences, like really grounded in people's data. I thought of durability almost like defensively, but I don't think that's playing to win and playing to survive. It's been about offense. It's not just surviving, it's about thriving. Regardless of the macroeconomic situation, when you unlock velocity somewhere, the bottleneck then moves. But if the person downstream of that isn't also unlocking velocity or capacity at the same rate, like the pinch point will move. And so sort of anticipating those pinch points I found across the business is where it's also like shifted what skillset I think has come forward a bit more.

**CJ Gustafson** (0:51)
Is this thing on?

**Seun Sodipo** (0:55)
Yesterday's price is not today's price.

**CJ Gustafson** (1:06)
I know we're all afraid of commitment, but if you can do me a solid and follow the show on Apple or Spotify, just send us a screenshot that you followed us. Send it to ben at mostlymetrics.com and he's gonna swipe my Brex card and he's gonna send you something. I really hope it doesn't go over budget, but he's gonna send you a hat, maybe a dog bowl, maybe a sticker, maybe a hat. Do we have hats, Ben? I don't know. That's the hat right there. He'll send you one. Hit follow, send a screenshot, ben at mostlymetrics.com. Boom. Welcome back to Run the Numbers, the show where I interview the world's top CFOs. I cannot believe some of the people picking up my phone call. Today, I'm talking to Seun Sodipo, the CFO of Plaid, one of the most exciting fintech companies in the private markets. We talk about the Plaid business model, which is truly a master class for anyone running a network effect business, the differences between tops down and bottoms up experimentation with AI, and how leaders can effectively motivate employees to use AI on their own. And finally, I talk to her about building an enduring company. Please subscribe to our show. It helps us with the algorithmic overlords. Let's get into the interview.
Seun, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

**Seun Sodipo** (2:16)
Ah, CJ, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**CJ Gustafson** (2:18)
So I've been a huge fan of Plaid for a while. And like the further I dig, the more I figure out how much this company does. It's amazing. It's a true network.
Many of the people listening may just know Plaid as, you know, the screen that pops up when they're like in their Bank of America or something like that. Maybe you can just give us the 30 seconds on what Plaid does and who it serves today.

**Seun Sodipo** (2:40)
Put simply, Plaid is the infrastructure underpinning digital finance. We enable consumers to securely connect their bank accounts or their brokerage accounts covering about 12,000 financial institutions with any of our Plaid customers. And we're very lucky and thankful to have about 9,000 Plaid customers, which can be anyone from Venbo, Coinbase, Robinhood to Rocket or Block. We power about 10 million secure data sharing events each day. So that gives you a bit of a sense of the scale and sort of the activity on our network.
And more than one in two in Americans with a bank account have used Plaid.

**CJ Gustafson** (3:17)
That's amazing. We were talking to Blake Grace in the CFO of DocuSign. And I think of Plaid in a lot of ways. It's like a high proportion of Americans have interacted with like DocuSign or Plaid. Or it's one of those things where instead of saying petroleum jelly, you say Vaseline, if you're going to connect your bank account or to a brokerage, you could just say, hey, I use Plaid for that or I connect using Plaid. So it's definitely ubiquitous in many senses.

**Seun Sodipo** (3:42)
Yeah, I'd love to turn Plaid into a verb. We should work on that.

**CJ Gustafson** (3:45)
You were kind enough to say that you read the Mostly Metrics newsletter, which blew me away. And you probably figured out that I'm a total business model dork. How does Plaid make money?
We heard who you serve and what the product is. How do you monetize?

**Seun Sodipo** (3:58)
I gave you layer one. We have a three-layer network. I'll move into layers two and three, and then I'll share a little bit about how we make money. So layer two is like once we built this connectivity layer, which we believe is one of the largest financial data networks out there, we moved into layer two. And what layer two is, it's a financial identity network. So as I, for example, or as you, CJ, connect more and more of your financial life to our customers using Plaid, we're able to build out a pretty comprehensive view of your financial life. And so we call that the financial identity network. And we have about 150 million consumers within that financial identity network. It's a pretty comprehensive 360 view. The more you connect, the more we can build out CJ's profile. And once we have these profiles built, we've been able to take a step back and be like, what are really gnarly problems in financial services? That we can now go and help solve in truly a really impactful way, now that we more deeply understand any individual's financial identity and financial life. And so we move into level three, which is what we call our Plaid Intelligence Layer. And our Intelligence Layer, we're focused on three priority areas, which is the first is credit underwriting, the second is anti-fraud, and the third is payments. And if I take credit underwriting, for example, within credit underwriting, we're all very familiar with credit scores. And I think almost everyone I interact with has their own funny story or frustration, frankly, with credit scoring. Frankly, I remember arriving in the US as a student and I had a bit of money in my account and I wanted a prepaid mobile phone and they would not let me open an account that way because I didn't have a credit score. I didn't exist within the system. And I was like, well, I can prepay and I can give you this cash I have. And they're like, no, it doesn't work. You need to go pay as you go. And so what are our cash flow scores allow you to do and our cash flow products allow you to do, is that they look at the money in, money out. So it's really powerful across the board for consumers, but in particular for thin file consumers that don't have as deep a credit history or don't have credit profiles. And so that's not to say they're not like credit worthy, but it's just that their financial life and the way their financial data shows up just doesn't fit into the system and the scoring that exists today. So that's just one small piece of what Plaid accomplishes now that we've built this three-layer network. Now turning to how we monetize the business. Simply put, we monetize the business when any financial action happens across our network. So this could be anything from connecting your account to one of our customers. It could be one of our customers verifying your identity or your income, for example, if they want to extend you some credit. It's combating fraud with that financial identity network that we have. We start to know you and we start to know what your financial habits look like. So when we see behavior that isn't you, we're uniquely positioned to flag that to our network and be like, hey, this person here, they're saying that they're CJ, but we're pretty convinced that they're not. Then we also make money anytime somebody initiates a payment or a network, or as you're going back to that cash flow example, provides cash flow data or score data to one of our customers for underwriting use case.