The connectivity rail for consumer debt - one API to link, understand and repay any liability a person holds.
Method's three-blade mark on its signature teal - a stylized "M" for the infrastructure quietly moving debt payments across America.
Nearly every consumer finance app wants to help people manage and pay down what they owe. Very few can actually move the money. Method is the reason a growing handful now can. Its API lets a developer link a consumer's credit and liability accounts - credit cards, student loans, auto loans, mortgages, personal loans - read the live details of each, and push payments straight to the creditor.
The company frames itself as the connectivity layer for the liability side of a person's financial life. Where the industry spent a decade learning to read a bank balance, Method focuses on the harder, messier half: the debts on the other side of the ledger, and the act of paying them down.
To connect, a user provides only a phone number. Method combines identity data from credit bureaus and telecom carriers with core banking system data, leaning on consumer data-access rights established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. There are no lender logins to hunt down and no paper forms to mail.
Once accounts are connected, applications can retrieve more than 300 data points per account - balances, transactions, due dates, APR ranges and payoff quotes - and then initiate payments from a platform's funding account directly to a user's creditors. That single move is what turned Method from a data platform into debt-management infrastructure.
A consumer links every credit and liability account across 20,000+ institutions using only a phone number - passwordless, no logins.
Method returns real-time data: balances, due dates, APRs, transactions and payoff quotes - 300+ data points per account.
Applications move money directly to creditors for loan payoffs, balance transfers and bill pay via Method's payment rail.
Passwordless linking of credit and liability accounts across 20,000+ financial institutions, backed by bureau and telecom identity data.
Real-time account information - balances, transactions, due dates, payoff quotes and APR ranges - 300+ data points for underwriting and engagement.
Embedded payments that move money to creditors for payoffs, balance transfers, bill pay and recurring repayment.
One-tap card and account linking - 500K+ cards connected - used for rewards, checkout and loyalty experiences.
Method powers more than 60 fintech and consumer-lending clients. Many are direct competitors, all running on the same underlying infrastructure - the mark of a utility rather than a feature.
SoFi uses Method to identify a borrower's outstanding loans during origination and apply funds directly toward them. Bilt links cards so members earn points. Aven runs balance transfers. Happy Money handles card payoff. Cleo feeds its AI assistant and debt dashboard.
The founders learned this the hard way. Jose Bethancourt and Marco del Carmen built GradJoy, a Y Combinator-backed student-loan management app, and ran headfirst into a wall of brittle lender APIs and paper-check processing. The bottleneck, they realized, was the business. GradJoy became Method in 2021.
Reading account data is now largely a solved, commoditized problem. The hard part is the payment: routing money to 15,000-plus creditors, reconciling it, verifying identity, executing same-day, and doing it reliably at scale. Method spent years on that unglamorous 96% so its customers could ship the glamorous 4%.
| Capability | Data aggregators | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Read liability data | Yes | Yes |
| Payoff quotes & due dates | Limited | Yes |
| Move money to creditors | No | Yes |
| Passwordless (phone only) | Rare | Yes |
| Balance transfer / refi flows | No | Yes |
Comparison reflects Method's stated positioning vs. typical data-only connectivity providers such as Plaid Liabilities.
"We started Method after experiencing firsthand how broken the financial account connectivity ecosystem was."
Method · Series B announcement, January 2025Method is a B2B API business. It sells developer-first connectivity and payment APIs to fintechs, banks, credit unions and lenders, monetizing through usage-based fees on account connections, data retrieval and payment volume. Consumers never pay Method directly - they experience it inside the apps they already use.
That places Method squarely in the "open finance" and embedded-fintech market, alongside data-connectivity players like Plaid, MX, Finicity and Akoya. Its wedge is the combination of liability data with a direct-to-creditor payment rail - a lane most aggregators do not occupy.
The timing tracks a broader shift: banking apps, wallets and lenders increasingly want to surface a user's outstanding debt and let them act on it without leaving the product. Embedded refinance, one-click balance transfers and in-app bill pay all depend on the kind of connectivity Method provides.
Its January 2025 Series B - $41.5M led by Emergence Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $60M - was earmarked for exactly this: broader institutional coverage, deeper card-network integrations, and end-to-end loan-refinance automation. In infrastructure, the moat is boring completeness.
Jose Bethancourt and Marco del Carmen build GradJoy, a YC-backed student-loan startup, and hit the wall of brittle financial connectivity.
The team launches Method in Austin to build a connectivity API for consumer credit and liability accounts.
Method adds its payment rail, letting applications move money directly to creditors - not just read balances.
Method expands into credit-card support and one-tap linking, powering rewards and checkout use cases like Bilt.
Emergence Capital leads a $41.5M round to expand coverage and refinance automation; total funding reaches ~$60M.
Jose Bethancourt - Co-Founder & CEO. Previously co-founded GradJoy; now leads Method's push to make debt repayment embeddable.
Marco del Carmen - Co-Founder & CTO. GradJoy alum; architects Method's connectivity and payment infrastructure.
Mit Shah - Co-Founder. Champions the passwordless model and Method's payment rail.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a New York presence; team of roughly 35-70.
Method provides an API that lets developers link a consumer's credit and liability accounts, read real-time data like balances and payoff quotes, and move money directly to creditors for payoffs, balance transfers and bill pay.
Plaid is best known for connecting bank accounts and reading data. Method focuses on the liability side - the debts a consumer owes - and adds a payment rail that pushes money to creditors, not just data retrieval.
More than 60 fintechs and lenders, including SoFi, Figure, Aven, Happy Money, Bilt and Cleo, use Method to embed refinancing, debt payoff, balance transfers and rewards features.
With just a phone number. Method combines identity data from credit bureaus and telecoms, leaning on Dodd-Frank data-access rights, so users don't need to log in to each lender.
Method has raised about $60M total, including a $41.5M Series B led by Emergence Capital in January 2025, and has facilitated over $500M in liability repayments across 30M+ account connections.