Plaid Co-founder To Step Down

William Hockey, co-founder, chief technology officer and president of Plaid, is leaving the company next week.

However, he will remain on the company’s board of directors.

“This conclusion was neither a rash nor a recent decision,” Hockey wrote in a blog post shared with reporters. “Over the past couple of years, I have known that there would come a point at which I would choose to move to a purely strategic and advisorial role.”

The company’s chief operating officer Eric Sager, chief executive officer and co-founder Zach Perret and other executives will take over engineering and product reports, as well as Hockey’s other responsibilities.

“In tech, it has historically been taboo to talk about founders or executives transitioning to different roles inside companies,” Hockey added. “Leadership transitions need to become a bedrock of any company that desires to endure across decades.”

Plaid develops infrastructure to enable consumers to interact with their bank account on the web, powering third-party applications like Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub. It has secured $310 million in venture capital funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Coatue Management, Goldman Sachs, NEA, Spark Capital and others.

Plaid has integrated with 15,000 banks in the U.S. and Canada, with 25 percent linked with Plaid through at least one of the hundreds of apps that use Plaid’s application program interfaces (APIs).

Last month the company launched a new service called Plaid Direct, which enables “two-way connectivity across the financial ecosystem and makes it easier for consumers to move money between their accounts — whether it’s in a neobank, FinTech, or big box bank account.”

The company said it now offers a “lightweight integration specification that allows banks and FinTech applications to quickly and easily become a data source in the Plaid network. By doing so, businesses can enable their customers to enjoy open banking-style connectivity across their toolkit of financial services providers.”