How Plaid is helping one app empower people to achieve their financial goals When Gil Akos and Sam Morgan set out in 2016 to develop prototypes of Astra—a smart personal finance tool for the overbanked, goal-oriented professional—they quickly realized that their product wasn’t going to scale without the insight that comes with personalized data. Everyone’s financial situation, they reasoned, is too idiosyncratic to base a platform on generalizations and assumptions. To make managing financial goals easier and more efficient, they needed a way to import user balance and transaction information and enable intra-app money transfers seamlessly and securely. For that, they turned to Plaid. Customized money management In pursuit of its mission to make finances more intelligent, empo

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