Partnerships can take several forms

Partnerships can take several forms. Partners can distribute for you, while other partners might be suppliers in a sense.

📈 In the second bucket you will find data #partnerships, which unsurprisingly are now trending.

Businesses increasingly rely on APIs and need access to rich customer data for product and marketing purposes.

💬 Jess R. previously managed data partnerships in Plaid and we discussed them in our fireside chat:

At Plaid, I was working on data supply relationships with primarily financial institutions or companies that were holding consumer permission data.

💡 It was imperative for the business to have these partnerships work, because without the supply of data, we're not able service our customers' needs, which is basically data that flows through the platform on behalf of consumers that are wishing to connect their accounts to services.

Those were multi-year, very complicated agreements in some cases with the largest banks in the world. A very different type of partnership, but not less important than any other commercial partnership program.

🙋🏻 Why do you call these data suppliers partners?

Because it is a two-way street that involves trust and those are the ones that work the best. In Plaid's case, in particular, it was very interesting to work in this space because it's highly evolving. Plaid was growing very, very quickly and the industry was changing a lot in terms of the number of fintech offerings out there for consumers.

Plaid was at the forefront and the hub of a lot of that. And a lot of the banks that we worked with and financial service institutions, we'd work with them in a consultative way and it went both ways.

💎 We’d say what we are seeing in the market, what we're hearing from customers, what the challenges are in the industry, how we can have best practices around data privacy.

These were really deep and detailed conversations that we were having with these partners, and they were also sharing information with us around how they approached it and a totally different perspective on the market. And I think that was beneficial in many cases for both Plaid and the institutions that we worked with.

So that is why ultimately it was a partnership.