Celebrating Method's First Year

How we got here

Our mission is to improve the financial lives of millions of Americans. To make that happen, we’re building the infrastructure and analytics to empower all companies, especially fintech, to help individuals manage their liabilities and make personal finance more autonomous.

GradJoy @ YC S19 Demo Day

It all started in summer 2019, when Marco and I first built GradJoy, a student loan robo-advisor, designed to help connect all of a user’s student loans into one app. When we presented GradJoy at YC S19 Demo Day, we didn’t realize the massive hurdles we’ll face when it came to interfacing users’ liabilities.

The entire process, from connecting user’s student loans, to debugging constant account disconnections, to mailing paper checks to student loan servicers, was an arduous and complex process. The experience we had facing these problems helped us determine exactly what to build, and led us to the solution that would become Method.

Launching the rocket ship

Our first year building Method was a fast paced and exciting one — our team was able to reimagine and ship some exciting new products and features. In our first few months, we launched Method Payments, which enabled our partners to push money to consumer liabilities accounts across 15,000+ financial institutions via a single API.

Next, our team tackled the process of connecting a liability to an application. Traditionally, it’s a brittle procedure powered by screen scraping and user authentication, typically through sharing a username and password. This led us to create Method Data, which connects a liability to an application using just a user’s phone number.

Thanks to these two products, we have been able to support thousands of end users. Our payments API has moved millions of dollars to support many use-cases. We’ve seen excitement from our partners who have utilized our products to connect end-users mortgages, credit cards, personal loans, auto loans, and much more.

Overall, our team shipped 35 new features and 550+ fixes and improvements over the last twelve months. Highlights include Method Sync, real-time data for all liabilities using just a phone number, expanded live liability data, SOC 2 compliance and many more user-requested features.

Looking ahead

We couldn’t have done this without the amazing support from our partners. Built on the backbone of cutting-edge identity verification providers, credit bureaus, and banking cores, our solutions power fintechs across the spectrum that are disrupting traditional lending and personal finance. Our partners are solving massive problems such as:

• Reducing the inequality gap by providing individuals with more competitive lines of credit.

• Improving the financial health of individuals by better helping them manage their liabilities all from one place.

• Providing cutting-edge tools, otherwise reserved for financial professionals, to individuals to put their personal finances on autopilot.

None of this could have been possible without our amazing team. We’ve grown the team to six people across Austin, Miami and DC. We are a remote-friendly company, but still believe in the power of in-person interaction and get together at least once a month. Some of our off-sites include everything from Wynwood dinners all the way to flying small planes across Austin.

Looking back at our first twelve months and everything we have accomplished gets us even more excited for what’s coming next. We want to revolutionize the future of financial APIs, and we are just getting started. If you want to build the future of fintech, you should consider joining us.