Plaid announced Thursday (July 28) that it is working alongside the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, in order to let Gemini users share account holding details and get a better view of financial planning.
In a company blog post, Plaid said that despite a growing interest in crypto, many people continue to face barriers to entry, with onboarding often meant solely for experts.
Some of the big issues include difficulty understanding how to open an account or confusion over what documents to submit, along with problems with funding accounts. Plaid and Gemini are reportedly trying to work on ways to bridge the traditional finance and crypto ecosystems.
“Now, Plaid and Gemini are working to simplify the user onboarding process, including making it faster and easier for Gemini users to fund their crypto accounts,” Plaid said in its announcement.
Through the collaboration, Plaid’s open banking platform offers an easy way for Gemini customers in the U.S. and U.K. to open and fund new accounts. Gemini customers can reportedly convert fiat to crypto more easily, and the two companies also want to work more on building experiences related to growing digital asset portfolios.
Plaid also recently debuted a tool in beta to help out with variable recurring payments (VRPs) for U.K. consumers and businesses. VRPs allow users to authenticate just once, so future automated payments can happen with no verification.
See also: Plaid Pilots Payments Tool to Streamline Recurring Payments
Plaid said that Expensify, a payments super app, has used VRP to streamline money management for expenses, corporate cards and bills. Plaid’s VRP also helped Expensify automatically pull varying repayments from customers’ business accounts to settle card balances.
“Our aim is to bring the Expensify Card to the U.K. as quickly as possible while maintaining the same industry-leading standards as our U.S. version of the card: a direct and seamless integration with the Expensify app, easy options to automate card payment, and transparency throughout the entire expense and pre-accounting process,” Sophie Pinto-Raetz, head of the Expensify Card launch in the U.K., said in a blog post at the time.
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