Ahikam Kaufman

And we started that in 2007.

And then we realized, we decided to focus on personal financial management data.

And in order to do personal financial management data at the time, Plaid did not exist.

So we decided to create our own data foundation and our own links to the banks in order to be in a position where whatever product we build on top of it, it will lay on a very structured set of data.

You had a company then called Yachtly and maybe another company.

But we decided to create our own data foundation, which is, by the way, was adopted by Intuit and using that same technology Intuit is using today for their bank fee.

So we decided to create our own.

And that was a tough decision.

Why?

Because we knew that consumers eventually will have to rely on our data for their personal financial management decisions.

And that data has to be super reliable.

At that time, we had a competitor called Mint, which was a very popular mobile application, but they bought their data.

So they relied on a certain.

party data infrastructure again before the plot days which was less reliable causing a lot of mistakes but so we spent like a year in the garage building our data foundation and only once we did that we started to build the application on top that would serve you with the value you need like you know seeing all your data from all your banks and credit cards and being able then to um

see all kind of anomalies in your data or fees or charges like that.

And then on top of that, we build a payment platform allowing you to pay your bills from these connections.

Because we own the connection or the bank feed, we could do like a two-way interaction with the bank or the credit card and actually use that connection in order to trigger the payment.

So the investment in data, which caused us to launch the product later than our competitors,

but launch a more robust product.

That's what also inspired us when we started to work on SafeBooks.