Galileo, Plaid Integrate To Streamline ACH Transfers

Galileo announced a partnership with Plaid Thursday (July 30) designed to streamline the bank authentication process for customers.

The Salt Lake City payment processing platform has joined with Plaid, a Visa subsidiary based in San Francisco, that builds financial technology platforms to connect bank accounts and initiate automated clearing house (ACH) transfers.

“Our new integration with Plaid supports our mission to remove the complexities of payment processing, so our clients can focus on innovation and the customer experience,” Galileo CEO Clay Wilkes said in the company’s announcement of the partnership. “Leveraging Plaid’s technology, we’re excited to offer a simplified process for our clients and minimize ongoing requirements to initiate ACH transfers.”

Plaid is connected to more than 11,000 financial institutions. It enables FinTechs and app providers easy access to approved consumer data to deliver financial products and services, Galileo said.

With Plaid’s platform integration, Galileo clients can enable their customers to conveniently authorize the transaction that initiates an ACH transfer, the company said.

“Today’s consumers expect the convenience of accessing all their bank information, from multiple banks and neobanks, from their financial apps,” Wilkes added. “Plaid has removed the complexity of meeting that expectation by making it simple for developers to authenticate customers’ bank accounts.”

“ACH payments have become increasingly popular for many consumers; a trend accelerated this year during the COVID-related shift toward ecommerce and away from brick-and-mortar retail experiences,” said Lowell Putnam, Plaid’s head of partnerships, in a statement. “However, the infrastructure and user experience around these payments hasn’t kept up with this new demand, which is why we’re excited to work with Galileo to provide a faster and easier experience for their clients to offer ACH transfers securely.”

Last month, Galileo launched what it called a faster and less expensive way to create debit cards. Dubbed Galileo Instant, it allows businesses to introduce debit card programs in as early as two weeks. While any business can use the tool to create branded debit cards issued by a financial institution, Instant promises to be especially useful for the U.S. businesses paying millions of 1099 or contract workers, Galileo said. The price of the service was not disclosed.

“In time and dollars, the barriers to entry in digital payments have been prohibitively high, even as the need for solutions has grown,” said Cole Wilkes, managing director of Galileo Instant, in a statement at the time. “Fast growing companies … need to pay their content creators and gig workers quickly and easily, but there hasn’t been an easy way to do that.”