Plaid

Plaid is a financial technology infrastructure company that provides APIs enabling applications to connect with users' bank accounts, verify account ownership, check balances, retrieve transaction history, and initiate payments. By abstracting the complexity of integrating with thousands of individual financial institutions, Plaid has become the standard financial data infrastructure layer for fintech applications in North America and Europe.

The Plaid Link is the primary user-facing component. It is a pre-built, customizable onboarding flow that guides users through the process of securely authenticating with their financial institution and authorizing Plaid to access their account data on behalf of the application. Link handles the institution selection, credential entry, multi-factor authentication, and consent management, returning a temporary token to the application that can be exchanged for a permanent access token.

Account and Identity verification is one of the most common use cases for Plaid. Applications can verify that a user is the owner of a specific bank account by confirming the routing and account numbers against the institution's records and matching the account holder's name. This verification is critical for ACH payment setup, investment account funding, and any other use case where the application needs to confirm ownership of a bank account.

The Transactions product provides a categorized, normalized transaction history from checking, savings, and credit accounts. Transactions are enriched with merchant names, categories, and subcategories that make them useful for personal finance management, spending analysis, lending underwriting, and tax preparation applications. Historical transaction data going back two years is typically available.

Plaid Assets is a dedicated product for financial assessment use cases such as lending and mortgage underwriting. It provides a standardized bank statement report showing balance history, income deposits, recurring expenses, and cash flow patterns, giving lenders the financial picture they need to make informed credit decisions.

The Auth product enables micro-deposit and instant verification of bank accounts for ACH payment setup. Instant verification uses Plaid Link to verify accounts in seconds rather than the one-to-three business days required for traditional micro-deposit verification.

Plaid Signal uses machine learning to predict the likelihood of ACH return based on account health signals, enabling payment platforms to assess risk before initiating ACH transfers and reduce return rates.

Plaid is widely used by neo-banks, investment apps, lending platforms, payroll services, accounting software, and any application that needs to interact programmatically with users' financial accounts.