Plaid CTO, Will Robinson: Shaping the future of financial infrastructure, Plaid’s north star metrics, efficient innovation flywheels, and AI

If you’ve used a fintech app in the last decade, whether it’s for payments, investing, lending, budgeting, or embedded finance, there’s a good chance Plaid was working quietly in the background.It’s the connective tissue between banks, fintechs, and consumers, powering account connectivity, identity, risk, payments, and the broader open finance ecosystem.Will Robinson, the CTO of Plaid, has been at the forefront of financial data innovation. With a background in tech giants like Google and startups like Coinbase, Will brings a wealth of experience to Plaid, where he leads the engineering vision for one of the most important financial data networks in the world that connects thousands of financial institutions to thousands of fintech applications, managing massive volumes of sensitive financial data, while balancing reliability, security, privacy, and performance at scale.In this episode with Will, we get into Plaid’s architecture, how the platform has evolved beyond aggregation, how they think about data quality and intelligence, how AI is reshaping financial infrastructure, as well as:The 2008 crash sparking curiosity in how FS works and how to make it betterLow-coupling, High-Cohesion computer science principles and their importance to fintechWhy brownfield development is a lot harder than greenfield devWhat the Plaid x Perplexity partnership means for consumers, hobbyists, and innovatorsThe tech metrics Will obsesses over and that are key to Plaid continuing to scaleThe now staple AI question which touches on their new transaction and behavioural models, the importance of their MCP server, and how Will thinks about Agents using Plaid’s data and services…and so much more.