Perret: AI agents will be the primary mortgage application method by 2027
Zach Perret · How AI Will Transform Fintech In 2026 · Dec 19, 2025 · at 10:22
Zach Perret is the co-founder and CEO of Plaid. He discusses the future horizon of AI and agentic interfaces across financial services.
0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And there are a few interesting use cases, but you know, fast forward two years and the way that you get a mortgage is going to be talking to your AI application.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Zach Perret
Perret: Financial fraud is currently the largest practical use case for AI
“It turns out the biggest use case for AI is fraudsters committing fraud against financial services companies.”
Perret: Traditional banking and crypto will converge around USDC checking accounts
“I suspect that there will be a convergence of One side of crypto and core financial services be that exchanging you know, like checking accounts with dollars in them for checking accounts with USDC in them, wallets with USDC in them or similar.”
Perret: AI has replaced human call centers in pig butchering scams
“That used to be done based on these, like human factories in, like, Malaysia, where they would, like, have these people, like, locked in rooms sending text messages to unassuming people in the U.S. Mostly, but around the world. Now that's all AI. You don't nee…”
Plaid CEO: Pay-by-bank will almost never succeed for in-person retail purchases
“No one's gonna walk into a Starbucks and say, I would like to pay for my three dollar coffee with my bank account. That's basically never gonna happen. Or any small merchant for that matter. Frankly, in my opinion, like, very few in-person transactions are eve…”
Perret: Large merchants will build their own payment and POS financing products
“I actually think you're underselling the merchants massively though. The level of the merchants are active in trying to build differentiated payments products, point of sale like point of sale financing products, like loans, so on and so forth. Not the small o…”