Plaid puts Quovo acquisition right to work with new investments product

When Plaid acquired Quovo earlier this year, it was clear the company wanted to move beyond checking and savings data to a broader view of investments. Today, the company announced Investments, an API based on Quovo, that enables customers to pull in investment data into their apps.

Lowell Putnam, head of partnerships at Plaid and former CEO and co-founder at Quovo, says there has been a hunger for this kind of data from customers and developers, and the Quovo purchase helped accelerate that inside Plaid .

“I think that the origins of the product comes from a company that I co-founded and also broader demand that Plaid has seen in the past several years. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a lot of our customers want the full 360 degree view of their clients,” Putnam told TechCrunch.

An investment account provides unique challenges over a checking or savings account, which has a certain amount of cash at any given time.”Instead of owning just cash in an account, investment accounts hold multiple securities in the same accounts, and the securities change in value, regardless of [whether you engage in trade activity or not], Putnam said.

Plaid sees this capability greatly expanding how developers use their APIs moving forward. “With connectivity to investment accounts, Plaid can serve a whole new set of use cases to enable developers, technology platforms, and financial institutions to deliver more insightful and compelling products,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new product.

He says that the two companies had recognized the power of bringing this kind of information into any financial application, even before the acquisition, and they have been working hard to make it happen since. “We realized that we have the opportunity to bring Quovo’s investment data expertise into the Plaid API stack, and do that with all of the tweaks and changes and enhancements that we’ve both been thinking about for the past several years,” he said.

The new product is available in the US starting today. It will be rolled out in other regions throughout the year.