From swipe to you: how your transaction data actually moves | how networks like Plaid work

Every time you swipe your card, a chain of invisible actions starts so that RocketMoney, Copilot, Mint (RIP), or YNAB have your most updated transactions ready for you. Aggregators like Yodlee, and MX, and data networks like Plaid, ledger and reconcile messy merchant data. My guest, Nick Sundin, is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Plaid, and we discuss how this work is getting easier because of things like FDX, and the role of Foundation Models in future use cases for your data, like lending and personalizing financial products. Listen to our conversation to learn the story of what happens when you swipe your card, and how that data eventually makes its way back to you. Links referenced in the video: • Financial Data Exchange (FDX): https://financialdataexchange.org/ • Stripe Payments Foundation Model: https://stripe.com/payments/ai • Visa TransactionGPT (Whitepaper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08939 • Plaid Transaction Foundation Model: https://plaid.com/blog/building-trans... • Patrick McKenzie's Reconciliation Game: https://keshikomisimulator.com/ ; https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archiv... • Plaid's Sequential Foundation Model: https://plaid.com/blog/sequential-fou... • RTP, explained: https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/... Nick Sundin is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Plaid with five years focused on building insights products, including Plaid LendScore. Prior to Plaid, he launched Dropbox Transfer. Visit www.movingmoneyright.com (https://www.movingmoneyright.com) to learn more!