DriveWealth Partners With Plaid For Frictionless Investing

The global brokerage infrastructure platform DriveWealth announced a new partnership Tuesday with the financial data network Plaid to give customers of both services simplified online investment account funding.

According to BusinessWire, customers of both firms can authenticate their end users’ bank accounts using Plaid and obtain tokens which provide fast, secure bank funding source verification through the DriveWealth API. This boosts the success rate for the Automated Clearing House, gives added visibility to transfers and guards customer information.

“While wealth management technology has greatly improved over the past decade, there is still too much friction that prevents people from investing their money how they want,” said Paul Williamson, Plaid’s head of revenue. “Companies like DriveWealth are changing that, and this partnership combines the power of Plaid with DriveWealth to make digital investing experiences even easier.”

Bob Cortright, CEO of DriveWealth, adds that the partnership will allow anyone from “FinTechs and banks to investment advisors and RIAs to quickly and securely add investment capabilities to their current offerings through a simple API,” thus giving more consumers equal access to investing in American markets.

Based in Chatham, NJ, DriveWealth bills itself as “a pioneer in fractional investing and data finance” dedicated to democratizing access to U.S. equities for investors around the world.

Plaid launched Plaid Exchange last year, an API platform designed especially to help financial institutions tap customer-permissioned data.

“We believe APIs are the future of open finance, and we want to make it as easy as possible for all financial institutions to incorporate APIs into their broader digital transformation agendas regardless of budget size and resources,” said Niko Karvounis, product lead at Plaid.

As PYMNTS reported last year, surveys have shown one of the key challenges facing banking executives is connecting legacy systems with new FinTech applications.