It can be challenging for developers of fintech apps to integrate repayment, balance transfer, and bill pay functionality. Devs often have to deal with a patchwork of brittle screen-scraping APIs to extract data from users’ financial institutions — or worse, tools to process mounds of physical checks and paperwork.
Three friends and entrepreneurs — Jose Bethancourt, Marco del Carmen, and Mit Shah — told TechCrunch that the blockers can be dealbreaking, particularly for smaller fintech teams. To attempt to overcome them — and help others to do the same — the trio launched Method, a platform that powers debt and debt repayment features in fintech applications.
“Jose and Marco experienced firsthand the challenges of financial account connectivity while building their first company, GradJoy, a Y Combinator-backed startup,” Shah told TechCrunch. “GradJoy aimed to simplify student loan management, but Jose and Marco quickly realized the limitations of existing account connectivity systems.”
Method works by leveraging consumer credit access protections enacted into law as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. By tapping into identity verification data from credit bureaus and telecom companies and combining it with data from core banking systems, Method can aggregate a person’s debts and execute balance transfers, bill pay, and payoffs and on their behalf.
Fintech developers can build the tech into their apps using Method’s API. All a user of those apps has to do is provide their phone number.
Method, which emerged from stealth in 2021, now supports over 30 million account connections for 4 million users, and has facilitated over $500 million in liability repayments to date.
Method powers a number of repayment features in fintech apps.Image Credits:Method
Method handles a lot of sensitive data, which might give some users pause. But Shah claims that Method collects only “minimum user information” and doesn’t sell data to third parties. The company is also plann …