Friends,

From an intellectual and strategic perspective, Plaid has long been one of my favorite companies to study. It’s a classic network effects business with true platform potential. It is also a critical catalyst in the fintech renaissance that birthed a wave of innovative experiences we rely on every day. 

I first wrote about Plaid in 2021, shortly after it stepped away from Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition offer. It felt like an apt time to assess its renewed potential as an independent company. When Plaid’s team reached out as part of our partner program, I was excited to assess what had changed over the intervening 2.5 years. (And see how my predictions stacked up!)

What I discovered both affirmed my interest and surprised me. Plaid is no longer a solo product with some intriguing add-ons – it’s a true multi-product business spanning payments, identity verification, fraud prevention, credit, and more. With relatively little fanfare, CEO Zach Perret has deepened his company’s moats, expanded overseas, and stacked an impressive group of senior executives. The result is a company that looks well-equipped to make the most of its second decade and capture the tens of billions in upside some investors believe are up for grabs.

Jump in

An ask: If you liked this piece, I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the “heart” ❤️ in the header above. It helps us understand which pieces you like most and supports our growth. Thank you!

Supported by Plaid

Partners like Plaid make it possible for The Generalist to deliver deeply researched case studies to readers like you, for free. We’re grateful for their support and encourage you to learn more about their business.

Plaid is a cutting-edge data network that makes it easy and safe to build financial services that drive better outcomes for consumers. It powers tools that millions of us use every day to live healthier financial lives. Venmo, SoFi, Etsy, Rivian, Chime, and thousands of other companies rely on it to provide their products. You can learn more about Plaid’s powerful and growing network, here.

Learn more

Actionable insights

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Plaid.

• From API to network. Plaid is best known as a provider of financial data APIs. That view is increasingly outdated. Over the past few years, the fintech has rolled out a suite of robust products spanning identity verification, payments, credit, and beyond. Its reported $250 million acquisition of Cognito in 2022 has proved particularly helpful in Plaid’s identity and fraud prevention push. 

• Beyond fintechs. Venmo was famously Plaid’s first customer. The payment app’s interest was the first of many, with thousands of fintech startups turning to Zach Perret’s infrastructure firm. Though Plaid is still the de facto choice for small tech-savvy players, its aperture has grown. Today, Plaid’s customers include big banks, industrial firms, e-commerce platforms, and car companies. As of 2022, more than 50% come from outside consumer fintech. 

• International ambitions. Though still focused on the US market, Plaid is now available in 17 countries. It’s making a particularly strong push to win Europe, which has quickly become its fastest-growing market. In doing so, it faces a new competitive set and a very different regulatory landscape. 

• A changing landscape. The American payments landscape is in a state of flux. New rails like FedNow and RTP offer instant transactions, threatening the hegemony of ACH. Given that much of Plaid’s product is built around ACH, this shift could pose a threat. Plaid will need to adapt and embrace these new networks to ensure it is not left behind. Its recent product launches suggest it’s more than ready to do so. 

• Room to run. Venture capital has flocked to fintech in recent years. The buzz around the sector can sometimes disguise how early we may be in the fintech revolution. By some measures, fintechs account for just 2% of the $12.5 trillion in global financial services revenue, a percentage expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. As the apex connector in the ecosystem, Plaid is positioned to benefit from sectoral tailwinds. 

This piece was written as part of The Generalist’s partner program. You can read about our ethical guidelines in the link above. We always note partnerships transparently, only share our genuine opinion and commit to working with organizations we consider exceptional. Plaid is one of them.

In January 2021, Zach Perret invited his company’s leadership team to his home in San Francisco. It was time to make a decision.

For the past year, Perret’s fintech Plaid had focused on finalizing its merger with Visa. The mammoth payment network had offered to buy the startup for $5.3 billion in late 2019. It had seemed a clear win/win at the time. Not only did Visa’s offer promise a massive windfall for Plaid’s employees and investors, it provided the access and credibility to radically accelerate their trajectory. Meanwhile, Visa looked set to secure one of fintech’s best-positioned firms with a talent base long-time investors considered remarkable. 

A year is a long time for any startup, but 2020, at Plaid, was especially eventful. Like the rest of the business world, the pandemic forced the company to adapt its operations, shifting to a fully remote structure. Covid’s greater impact, however, was on Plaid’s customer base. As physical branches shuttered, all essential banking activity moved online. In tandem, a scorching bull market sparked widespread interest in retail investing. An unprecedented eruption swept the fintech sector as consumers flocked to new, tech-first products. Though companies like Robinhood and Coinbase may have earned the headlines, Plaid was the quiet winner, its financial infrastructure subtly powering the revolution. 

Toward the end of 2020, Zach Perret began to ask himself: did it still make sense to sell to Visa? It was not a simple question to answer. On the one hand, the synergies between the two companies were significant. Indeed, Perret had already witnessed the impact of being associated with Visa; even though the acquisition had yet to close, its promise had given Plaid new credibility with banking’s biggest players. Doors that had once looked closed opened before his young firm. 

On the other, Plaid was no longer the same company it had been 12 months earlier. Covid had acted as a “huge inflection point,” in Perret’s view, and his firm had the traction to show for it. Along with its astonishing growth rate, the past year has also demonstrated Plaid’s importance and influence in the financial firmament. Five-point-three billion dollars had once seemed like a good price; it was beginning to look too much like a bargain. That the Department of Justice looked set to complicate the merger didn’t help matters.

And so, Perret called a meeting to make a final, multi-billion dollar decision. Would Plaid proceed with the acquisition or recommit itself to life as an independent business?

There was some symmetry in Perret’s choice of venue. The decision to sell a year earlier had been made in his living room, with leadership congregating at his house over a December weekend to avoid disrupting the broader workforce. Perret’s home now served as a meeting point again, albeit in a somewhat altered configuration. With Covid precautions still in effect, Plaid’s leadership spread across the room. Some even sat outside, beyond a set of open patio doors.

Over that day, Plaid’s leadership assessed the different options – and the risks that came with them. What would it mean to walk away from the deal? How would employees that had expected a significant payout feel about the volte-face? Could the company rebuild the parts of the team it had deprioritized in preparation for a merger?

Despite the inevitable complications, the more leadership talked, the clearer the decision became. Plaid’s potential had meaningfully grown in the past year, and the team was keen to fulfill it as a standalone business. Perret’s choice was made: Plaid would stay an independent company. It was, in spirit, a second founding, a group of operators electing to remain in the arena.

With the benefit of two-and-a-half years since that decision, we can see what Plaid has done with its second lease of life. More impressive than the $13.4 billion valuation it secured shortly after walking away from the Visa deal is the manner in which the firm has expanded its aperture. 

For much of its life, Plaid was defined by its extraordinary first product: an API that made it easy for financial products to connect to a consumer’s bank account. That may still be the prevailing image for many, though it’s increasingly outdated. Over the past few years, Plaid has aggressively pushed into adjacent areas, including identity verification, fraud prevention, payments, and assets and income verification for lenders. As well as becoming a true multi-product business, these forays have strengthened the firm’s core strategic advantages and further differentiated it. Plaid has the makings of a generational financial platform with enduring network effects. If well managed, Plaid could be a long-term compounder, growing for years to come. 

For that to happen, Perret’s company must continue investing in innovation, pushing forward on its recent initiatives, and finding fresh ways to bring value to its customer base. It must do so at a time when the broader American financial system is in a state of flux. Recently launched payment networks like FedNow may alter how money moves in the US, posing new challenges and opportunities. Ultimately, as more financial interactions move online, few businesses are better positioned than Plaid. 

This is a portrait of a company that shook up the banking industry, laid the groundwork for the fintech renaissance, walked away from $5.3 billion, and has designs on becoming the next great network for all online financial activities. 

Origins: A long climb

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” That quote, usually misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi, is an apt summation of Plaid’s journey. From the perspective of the financial world’s big players, the startup has evolved from an irrelevance to a pest to an existential threat to a pivotal partner.

Rites of passage

Every management consultant worth their salt must be in possession of a few essential items. The non-negotiable tools of the trade: a stack of starched button-downs, fluency with business lingo, a ready smile, a penchant for “back of the envelope” calculations, and, above all, facility with the Microsoft Office Suite. 

In 2011, at Bain & Company’s Atlanta offices, Zach Perret inducted William Hockey into this class of business magi, teaching him the basics of Microsoft Excel. It is funny to imagine this as the introduction for one of fintech’s most quietly innovative founding pairs: a nondescript office room, a standard-issue laptop, a sea of blank spreadsheet cells.

Thankfully for modern financial consumers, that drab context didn’t dampen the immediate kinship between Perret and Hockey. While fumbling through a few macros, they discovered they were both software developers by training, agreeing that Python would be a much more efficient way of solving the tutorial they’d been tasked with. They also discovered a shared passion for climbing, which led to a perilous weekend excursion. While scaling a local rockface, Perret dropped Hockey twenty feet. Though it sounds like a lively anecdote today, it was a genuinely frightening moment that cemented the colleagues’ bond. “We became friends for life,” Perret said of the episode.

Beyond climbing and coding, the pair shared another interest – one that has united consultants for generations: the desire to leave consulting. Neither would make it to the standard two-year mark, decamping for New York City in 2011. They left Georgia with little plan other than to find their way into the more dynamic world of tech startups. 

City of empires

It was not an easy transition, and in truth, New York City in 2011 was not the place to make it in tech. Though the city has seen a surge in activity and venture funding over the past few years, bringing it closer to parity with Silicon Valley, it lagged far behind in the early 2010s. Beyond Union Square Ventures, there were few active, early-stage franchises in the city and a paucity of successful startups from which to draw wisdom or talent. The year that Perret and Hockey moved, NYC-based startups attracted approximately $4 billion in venture funding; a decade later, volume would crest $29 billion. 

What New York lacked in startup activity, it more than made up for in financial relevance. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement consumed the city’s banking industry. After police booted protestors from Zuccotti Park in the financial district, they settled in Union Square, home to a workspace Perret and Hockey had found. It served as a provocative impetus, challenging the would-be operators to direct their attention toward an inadequate financial system needing new solutions.

As they searched for opportunities, Perret and Hockey decided to spend their free-time building better financial applications. Clearly, consumers weren’t being served by the status quo – could technology help make something better? On the heels of earning (and forgoing) their first full-time salary, it’s perhaps unsurprising that budgeting was a particular area of interest. Indeed, Perret had deliberately stayed at Bain long enough to receive his $4,000 bonus but quickly found it didn’t last long as a would-be entrepreneur in the city. In developing various side projects, the pair confronted a stubborn problem – and recognized an opportunity. To build a decent budgeting application, you need data from the consumer’s bank. 

How else could you quantify and categorize a user’s spending? Despite its obvious utility, getting that information wasn’t easy. To do so, application builders like Hockey and Perret had to build bank integrations for each institution. If you wanted to serve Bank of America customers, you needed to build that integration; if you had users with Goldman Sachs accounts, you’d have to create that connection. This pattern repeated across the country’s tens of thousands of financial institutions. 

To Perret and Hockey, this seemed like a mind-boggling inefficiency. It was, effectively, an operational tax on innovation. By Perret’s estimation, constructing the requisite connections absorbed “85% to 95%” of his and Hockey’s coding time, taking focus away from developing the budgeting app’s actual feature set. How could any small team get off the ground with such demands monopolizing bandwidth? A better system was needed, the pair agreed. Why shouldn’t they be the ones to build it?

The Venmo inflection

In early 2012, the former consultants decided to officially strike out on their own. They set about building a new banking infrastructure platform from their small Union Square office. They found an apt name for their company by staring at their whiteboard one day. Perret and Hockey wanted their startup to not only connect to banks but structure the information it received. 

Review your monthly bank statement, and alongside familiar names, you’ll see strange strings of numbers and letters that don’t connote an obvious vendor. For financial applications, that represents a challenge. How can you help consumers understand their spending when you can’t be sure where their money is going? To try and decipher this code for the financial apps they hoped to serve, the founders “cross-compared” transactions, looking for similar locations or patterns. It produced a strange hatching when they mapped that process out on the board. Looking at it, one of them remarked that it looked like plaid fabric. After some research, they discovered the name was free of trademark squatters, and a dot-com domain was available for purchase. As Perret said, “the rest is history.”

That history might have been a short one were it not for Venmo. As Sam Lessin, General Partner at Slow Ventures and early-Venmo investor, alluded to in a recent interview, the peer-to-peer payments app holds an unusual position in tech’s recent history. Today, it is ubiquitous, achieving verb form, processing hundreds of billions of dollars in volume annually beneath PayPal’s umbrella. Yet, it was sold to Braintree for $26.3 million in 2012, a relative pittance, before Braintree was snapped up by PayPal for $800 million a few years later. 

Around the time of Venmo’s initial acquisition, a friend at the company reached out to Perret and Hockey. The payments app sought a better way to connect to consumers’ banking accounts. Could they help? 

It was an early inflection point. Signing Venmo validated the need for Plaid’s product and brought a wave of end-users through the door. Critically, it acted as an important proof point, too. A new generation of “fintech” companies had bubbled up in Venmo’s wake; those upstarts turned to Plaid to address their infrastructural problems. 

False equivalencies

Perret and Hockey decided to head west to Silicon Valley in search of capital and talent. Despite their success in snagging Venmo as a customer, raising funding was far from easy. Indeed, what seems like an obvious opportunity today was viewed skeptically by yesteryear’s capitalists. In large part, that was a result of the sector’s history. While Perret and Hockey were right in noting that no one had adequately solved the problem of making bank data accessible to small startups, alternatives did exist. Yodlee, founded in 1999, was the space’s elder statesman. 

While its team had succeeded in building a large, viable business, it hadn’t broken out to become a true tech giant. (It would eventually go public at a $340 million valuation in 2014, then sell to private equity for $660 million a year later.) For many venture capitalists, that suggested the market for Plaid was capped, incapable of delivering a multi-billion-dollar fund returner. By Perret’s count, at least fifty venture capitalists passed on investing in the startup’s seed.

These investors may have missed Plaid’s differentiated approach and the material changes in the market. In particular, Plaid made three very different decisions than many of the sectors precursor companies:

1. A new, growing market segment. Perret and Hockey fundamentally believed that technology would transform the financial system. In particular, they foresaw the rise of rich consumer fintech applications capable of taking action on behalf of the user – whether sending money or making an investment. The founders also expected financial transactions to “embed” themselves across the internet, showing up in e-commerce flows, home purchases, and car buying. Plaid would serve this tech-savvy customer base, growing along with it. 

2. A different distribution channel. Bank connectivity providers typically sold top-down, leveraging dedicated sales teams. Plaid took a different approach. Rather than spending months selling to a senior buyer, it sought to win over developers with its superior API and clean documentation. Like Stripe, Plaid recognized that developers held the power when it came to tech startups.

3. A more flexible model. Providers like Yodlee favored long, annual contracts. While that made sense for a more mature client base and a more involved sales process, it wasn’t a fit for Plaid’s segment. The startup offered a usage-based approach to make it easy to get up and running with a more limited budget.

In sum, Plaid appeared to offer a superficially similar product to its predecessors but actually ran an entirely different playbook. Spark Capital recognized that promise, leading a $2.8 million seed round in the fall of 2013, with Google Ventures, Homebrew, NEA, and Felicis participating. 

It wouldn’t take long for Plaid to raise its next round. In November of the next year, Perret and Hockey pulled in a $12.5 million Series A from inside investors. Within 18 months, Plaid had gone from a Sand Hill reject to a hot commodity.

Move fast and scrape things

As fintech bloomed, Plaid grew with it. But how, exactly, did Perret and Hockey’s product work? (For a theatrical, metaphorical explanation, you might enjoy a previous piece The Generalist published on the subject.) 

In its early iterations, the startup relied on a data collection method called “screen scraping.” To bring bank account data into a fintech application, Plaid would receive credentials from the user, programmatically log in to their banking portal, and “scrape” relevant data like their account balance and recent transactions. Plaid would then ferry that information back to the fintech application to allow the consumer to use the application in question.

Plaid used this method as a matter of necessity. Fundamentally, screen scraping is a suboptimal way of collecting data. Small changes to the visual interface of the site being scraped can disrupt the process. Ensuring connections work requires significant upkeep and, thus, real cost. It’s also a relatively blunt tool, often extracting all data on a given screen – some of which consumers may not need to share. By comparison, API connections are much more reliable and targeted.

At the time, Perret and Hockey did not have the luxury of choice. Virtually no banks offered accessible APIs, making scraping the only viable way to serve consumers and connect their banking data with a growing wave of fintech apps. Years earlier, Yodlee had reached the same conclusion, building its business on the back of this methodology. 

In those early days, the user experience of linking one’s account also differed from today. When Plaid’s customers implemented the service, they typically visually matched the account connection screen to the consumer’s designed bank. Plaid would later change this approach, highlighting its brand more visibly to emphasize its role in the connection process. (Class action plaintiff lawyers would later argue that because of this practice, some users were unaware that Plaid was involved in linking their accounts to an app they used. To avoid the costs of protracted litigation, Plaid paid a $58 million settlement. In agreeing to the settlement, the company explicitly refuted the claims and restated its commitment to consumer privacy. Today, the firm has some of the best user-facing privacy features on the market, which we’ll discuss shortly.)

Banks did not look kindly on this practice. Specifically, they resisted customers linking accounts to apps and services they could neither control nor oversee. That hostility was reflective of the skepticism with which industry heavyweights viewed fintech, putting Plaid into an adversarial position with key stakeholders. Perret’s firm wanted to connect to banks, but banks wanted very little to do with the upstart aggregator, uninterested in supporting digital use cases. However, as the company grew through 2014 and 2015, it became increasingly difficult to ignore. 

Twenty-sixteen showcased banking’s animosity and Plaid’s growing influence. In April of that year, Jamie Dimon used his shareholders’ letter to warn against the specter of fintech applications and aggregators. The JPMorgan CEO shared his concerns about startups selling consumer data and introducing new risks. While some of these worries were legitimate (Yodlee, for example, purportedly sold consumer data to hedge funds), The New York Times’ coverage of the subject summarized the strategy behind the scaremongering: “Jamie Dimon Wants to Protect You From Innovative Startups.” Two years later, Capital One would go so far as to block third-parties from accessing Plaid, upsetting some of its customers. 

Thankfully for Plaid, not all banks took such a dim view of innovation. A few months after Dimon’s letter, the company raised a $44 million Series B at a $225 million valuation. Crucially, the round was led by Goldman Sachs with participation from Citigroup and American Express’s venture arms. It had taken approximately four years, but Plaid had officially won the favor of some of Wall Street’s powerbrokers. Within another four, it would have a multi-billion acquisition offer on the table.

Tough choices

By the time Visa bid in late 2019, Plaid was a very different company. It had grown rapidly in the intervening period, hitting 10 million consumer account connections in 2017 and doubling to 20 million the following year. That growth was aided by the maturation of its customer set as users like Venmo and Chime reached a mass audience. 

It had also raised more capital – and completed a purchase of its own. In 2018, Plaid closed a Series C co-led by Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. The $250 million round represented a huge markup from the 2016 investment, valuing Plaid at $2.4 billion. In the lead-up to the Series C closing, Plaid strengthened its position by acquiring a competitor: Quovo. Founded in 2013, Quovo had built a solid business serving the wealth management space, winning over customers like Wealthfront, Betterment, and Vanguard. 

Though Quovo lagged behind Plaid, it was seen as something of an “ankle biter,” as Index General Partner Mark Goldberg noted. “In some ways, they were the cheaper alternative. They could exert pricing pressure and had very strong penetration in the wealth management vertical.” Indeed, when writing his investment memo before the Series C round, Goldberg cited Quovo as a key rival. To hear halfway through the process that Plaid was absorbing the firm was cause for celebration. “To get that call saying, ‘We’re buying Quovo.’ That was just fantastic.” Plaid onboarded a new customer base and fortified its position as fintech’s leading aggregator.

Plaid’s biggest shift came on the leadership front. In 2019, William Hockey decided to step back from the firm, leaving Perret to run it alone. It was a difficult change, per Plaid’s CEO. “That was a hard one for me,” he said. “Not because it wasn’t the right outcome for William or the right outcome for the business, but because William is one of my best friends.” At the core of the shift was Hockey’s realization that he enjoyed the early days of company building rather than the demands of scaling an organization. “He wasn’t having as much fun running a bigger company. He wanted to be at a small company – that’s what he loved the most. The thing was that I was going in the opposite direction: as the company got bigger, I had more fun.” When attempts to rework Hockey’s role and bring back some joy didn’t work, Hockey chose to set out on a new adventure.

Though Hockey’s departure didn’t disrupt Plaid’s operations, Perret felt his friend’s absence. “When it really set in 6 to 12 months later that I was the sole founder, then it felt lonely. The person that you used to talk to all the time isn’t there anymore. William and I still talk all the time, but he doesn’t have the same kind of context anymore – he wasn’t in the conversation that I was in yesterday.”

Hockey’s decampment meant that when Visa called in 2019, the final decision rested with Perret alone. The same was true a year later. Though Perret brought leadership into the process, hosting them at his San Francisco home, ultimately, the choice was his. With the benefit of hindsight, Perret believes both decisions – agreeing to Visa’s deal and then walking away from it were correct. “Visa offered us incredible opportunities to grow a lot faster and really internationalize in a big way,” Perret said of his initial rationale to sell. “They offered to fund us as an independent entity, so after going back and forth, we decided to sell. It was a difficult, emotionally-complex decision, but even with perfect hindsight, I believe it was the right decision at the time for the company to sell.” 

A different calculation underwrote the 2021 reversal. “The prospects for us independently were much better: we’d benefitted hugely from Visa’s brand halo and the relationships we’d created, and our business had grown rapidly. And the reality was that the regulators had every intention of fighting the deal as hard as they could, even if I was optimistic it would close.” Perret summarized the ultimate rationale: “The main reason we walked away from the transaction was because the business was a fundamentally different business.”

Plaid’s existing investors supported the move. “There was a big sigh of relief and a lot of fist pumping and cheering at the Index office when we knew we were going to have an independent path,” General Partner Mark Goldberg recalled. “It’s going to take a lot longer, but I think Plaid is going to be a much bigger outcome.”

Just because it was the right decision did not make it easy. “It was the hardest year I’ve ever had in business,” Perret said of 2021. “There’s a lot of emotional complexity of saying to the team, ‘Hey, this thing we got you excited about [isn’t going to happen] and we need you to go with us.’” Landing that message would have been challenging at the best of times, but it was especially tricky given covid constraints. 

In addition to reorienting company focus, Plaid also had to address structural gaps. “There were things we hadn’t done for a certain amount of time. For example, we hadn’t hired certain roles because we wouldn’t have needed them had the transaction closed,” Perret recalled. “We had to really quickly rebuild elements of the leadership team, we had to do this financing round because we had this big opportunity to raise additional capital, we started to scale up some of our new products – it was this crazy six month period at the start of 2021. It was the hardest period, not because the outcomes were bad – the outcomes were excellent – but because of the work we needed to do to get people running in the right direction again.”

Plaid experienced ridicule, rejection, animosity, and wild success in its first ten years of operations. It began its second decade as it had its first: standing on its own two feet, certain that the best was yet to come.  

Product: The power of connections

Plaid is still largely known as a bank data API. Ask the average tech worker what Perret’s company does, and you’ll likely hear a description of that first product: Plaid is a business that helps consumers connect bank accounts to fintech apps. Though this is still true and an important part of Plaid’s business, it is no longer a sufficient explanation. As Matthew Sueoka, Head of Amex Ventures, noted, “A broader audience probably doesn’t understand the volume of use cases that are possible through the technology they have.”

Over the past few years, the $13.4 billion firm has morphed into a multi-product business boasting a range of offerings. Indeed, Plaid’s range has grown so vast it can be difficult to get one’s arms around its sophisticated functionality at first blush. By our count, more than a dozen different products are available for developers. 

Keep reading

Puzzler

Respond to this email for a hint. 

What is bought by the yard but is worn by the foot?

Frequent champion Austin V scaled the great heights of the Puzzler section once more, responding to our last riddle quickest. He was joined by Greg K, Michael S, Bruce G, Rob N, Laura F, Emerson K, Favour U, James M, Massimiliano B, Scott F, Michael O, Nathan M, Gary J, Shashwat N, Joshua K, Jonathan H, John G, Kelly O, Ohad S, Pablo T, Scott M, Uri S, Adeiza H, Gabriela C, Morihiko Y, Julia D, Vanshi T, Prasanna D, Ying C, Ariel B, and Abe M. All deciphered this conundrum: 

What gets progressively smaller every time it takes a bath?

The answer? A bar of soap. 

Until next time,

Mario