With Plaid partnership, Microsoft Excel is now a fintech app
- Excel becomes more useful with a new integration that accesses live consumer bank and spending data.
- Microsoft partnered with Plaid, as the data aggregator expands the radius for financial data outside of fintech.
The spreadsheet has always been a go-to tool for organizing and managing finances. Heck, for all their talk about modern technology, entire fintech companies are running on Google Sheets.
Spreadsheet as financial manager: The new Money in Excel allows users to connect their financial accounts, import their data, and sync balances and transactions over time.
- Microsoft partnered with Plaid to provide the permissioned connection to financial accounts via Plaid Link from directly within the Microsoft Money in Excel experience.
- After linking accounts, an individual has access to her balance and transaction history.
- Money in Excel offers a variety of templates, charts, and graphs for users to track their finances over time.
- A “Monthly Snapshot” sheet features personalized charts and graphs using user data to help better understand spending behavior.
- Money in Excel will roll out in the U.S. in the next few months.
Everyone is a fintech: Plaid's domain, like most of the data aggregators, has traditionally been connecting fintech apps with users' financial data at their financial institutions.
- That's changing as an increasing number of non-financial companies dabble with banking and financial products.
- Microsoft’s Money in Excel is one of the first major examples of how companies outside of the financial services industry are looking for assistance with their new fintech products and capabilities.
- Plaid also works with non-finance tech companies, like Shift and Carvana, and claims it is in discussion with 25 percent of Fortune 100 companies about their fintech initiatives.
- Plaid connects to 11,000 institutions across the US, Canada, and Europe.
“Plaid has always focused on powering innovators," said Eric Sager, COO at Plaid. "To date that has consisted primarily of developers at startups like Venmo, Square, Acorns, Blend, Dave and others."
"However, it might surprise people to learn that we are talking to more than 25% of Fortune 100 companies about serious fintech initiatives. Like Microsoft, many of these larger, tech-forward companies have little to no role in financial services today, but will likely help shape our fintech reality for decades to come given their consumer footprint."