Zachary Perret on open banking regulation, payment modernization, and how Silicon Valley's DC relationship has transformed in 7 years

gonna go right here so that you're kind of aiming at us right here. So, just kind of sit right here. Thank you. Lean into the mic as much as possible. Look at this. Doing your own AV setup. Yeah, we got two of the best in the business here.

But, uh, you know, it helps when everyone's an individual contributor when you're running a startup, right? Totally. I've got to say this getting into this room is the hottest ticket here. the line at your door is just like impressive person after impressive person. All right.

Were you were you an early uh like an individual contributor in the early days at who else would do the work? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Um so fintech remember fintech like wasn't always you know one of the hottest categories.

The first like four years of the business were me telling VCs hey financial services we could innovate here like this might be a thing. 2016 someone came up with the word fintech and then it finally caught on. Crazy story from uh Keith.

you wouldn't have heard, but he said the last time he was in the capital building was in 2003 fighting for PayPal's life. Oh my goodness. Cuz after 911, there was like a lot of regulation being pushed. Yeah.

Uh but speaking of uh uh financial regulation is like everyone here is obviously, you know, super aware of what's going on with the DoD. There's a lot of DoD budgets and every defense tech company's looking for their next program of record or SBI. Uh what is the mood uh in Washington around financial regulations?

Are there is there low hanging fruit meme that everyone talks about if are people talking about it enough? It's a good question. Um right now there's probably three things that are top of mind for everybody. Um first is the Genius Act which is the crypto stable coin regulation.

Um that is as far as I can tell moving though I don't know the the day-to-day details of that one. Um second is uh there's section 1033 of DoddFrank. This is the open banking regulation that was put into in it's put into place under the last administration.

Um this administration we'll we'll see what happens but there's some talk of making a few modifications to it before it before it fully goes live. Um and then the third big thing is the conversation somewhat kicked off by Doge somewhat not about payments modernization.

So, can we move the the payment system of the US to not send out paper checks to everybody in all these places with old addresses and so on and so forth and actually make it a little more modern.

So, do you have any type of estimate of of how of how many of those paper checks just never ever even get, you know, have basically been paid but just sort of sit in the Well, they don't get cash. That's that's money back in the taxpayer. Maybe we don't want to move off paper. Maybe this is free money for the taxpayer.

You got to keep in mind the cost in the system. So you have people that are writing the check to you, people that are mailing the checks. It probably costs, you know, $5 to $10 to send out the check to each person. Then you get it, you bring it to the bank, it cost the bank $5 or $10 to actually cash the check.

So getting that out of the system would be a net worth thing. Plus getting people payments a little faster is not a bad thing. Totally. Talk about the difference in your experience, you know, this week versus maybe your first trip to DC for for Plaid. For Plaid ever. Oh my gosh. What was your first trip ever?

I I think it's must have been seven years since since since since the first trip here. Um you know, we were we were lucky. We hired um our first head of business development had worked in the previous administration. At some point she said, "Hey, Zack, we we should go to DC and meet some people and talk about it.

" You know, there's there's some things that are relevant to Plaid. We known that this open banking rule was going to come eventually. And uh so so even seven years ago, you were thinking about this new open banking. Oh yeah.

I mean the concept of plat has always to been to to kind of build open banking for the world to build infrastructure that enables people to um link their bank accounts really easily. We've of course created a ton of stuff on top of the network that came from that later.

Um but we knew that this regulation was a thing that would be written at some point. Um so we started spending time here. We hired a policy team uh in DC. I think we probably still have four or five people that are just based in DC full-time. Um and right now just the conversation is totally different.

the the the size of this conference, the number of people that are here, um the number of other tech CEOs that I'm seeing in DC, even just casually, the I was here about a month ago and was walking into a building and out of the building was was walking a kind of big public company CEO.

So like say hello and it's like that runin would not have happened seven or eight years ago. Um so it is kind of a testament to in some sense Silicon Valley for people being willing to come out here and have these conversations.

um in a big sense is a testament to to to the administration and to a lot of the people that have put together forums like this uh to bring uh to bring the two sides together. So, it's been an awesome event so far. That's awesome. Well, you got to get to your next panel.