Plaid and Microsoft partner to turn Excel into a fintech app
Plaid, the company laying down the plumbing which connects fintechs to users’ bank accounts, has partnered with Microsoft to create a new application called Money in Excel.
Marc Andrusko, who heads up growth at Plaid, said in a blog post that the new Plaid integration “essentially turn[s] the spreadsheet software into a fintech app”.
Categorising payments and transactions
By providing a link to bank account data through Microsoft’s Excel, individuals can use the familiar spreadsheet filters to get a better understanding of their payments and transactions.
Be that segmenting cash, credit and savings transactions, or segmenting payments by category, for example food, travel, or shopping.
The integration also offers a sheet which includes personalised charts and graphs comparing a current month’s spending with a previous one, displaying top spending categories, and cumulative spending through the month.
There are further templates users can add, such as ones which identify recurring expenses, or breakdown net worth.
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Microsoft Teams project manager Anirudh Narayan said on Twitter: “With direct bank account integration, it’s [Excel] now a powerful, fully customisable, no code personal finance tool.”
Plaid’s Andrusko confirms that the new integration “will start to become available in the US in the coming months”.
Currently, Plaid says it connects to 11,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, and Europe.
The monthly snapshot sheet
“One of the earliest forms of ‘fintech’ is a budgeting spreadsheet,” says Andrusko. “For years, people have relied on Microsoft Excel to budget and track expenses for their personal finances or businesses.”
And this partnership with Microsoft to bring the capabilities of fintech and application programme interface (API) technology to more traditional programmes such as Excel will not be the only one.
Plaid’s chief operating officer Eric Sager said in a separate blog post: “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.”
