“We’re just in a dead sprint using AI to fight AI fraud,” Zach Perret, the data aggregator’s chief executive, said at the Money20/20 conference this week.

LAS VEGAS – As artificial intelligence reshapes the industry, Plaid co-founder and CEO Zach Perret expects financial services will become “a monetization lever” for AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Perret, speaking Tuesday at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas, pointed to card issuance as an example, in which those companies would collect interchange fees from the card issued and embedded within the AI platforms, which he referred to as “harnesses.”

“That's a pretty straightforward thing to have happen,” Perret said. “Maybe they do more lending products and so forth, but I think the card issuing will make a lot of sense in step one.”

San Francisco-based Plaid, one of the largest financial data aggregators, works with about 12,000 institutions, connecting customers’ financial accounts to other apps and services.

As AI platforms go from analysis to action, Perret said he’s watching to see which financial services functions continue to be conducted through a bank’s platform and which occur through AI platforms.

“Is the entirety of your financial life going to live within the harness,” he said, “or are you going to see the banks themselves, or the fintechs themselves, start to launch agentic experiences that live right there?”

The impact of AI agents on the industry and their role acting on customers’ behalf was one of the biggest topics of discussion at Money20/20, spurred by big-bank CEO commentary around liability and risk, as well as buzz around personal AI agents such as Meta’s Muse.

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