Plaid

Plaid is a Financial Data aggregation API Provider, enabling developers to build fintech apps that directly connect to bank accounts, enable payments and manage financial risks. What Plaid’s API does is, it creates a direct connection between users’ bank accounts to applications, allowing the latter to have safe access to the financial data, and through easy authentication, ensures the security for users.

To put it simply, Plaid acts as a connecting link for banks and fintech companies and is already used extensively by a number of noteworthy fintech firms, such as Venmo, TransferWise, Gusto, and Level Money, which utilize Plaid’s solution for powering their services. For example, Level Money – a budgeting app, uses plaid in order to gain and categorize data from the various bank accounts that the user might have and uses that data to help their customers to budget their finances. Meanwhile, Gusto – an online HR service provider, utilizes an automated clearing house (ACH) function supplied by Plaid for its Software that deposits employee salaries directly into their bank accounts.

Currently Plaid occupies a crucial position in the field of fintech services, powering a wide variety of software in the market, that offer a range of services, such as channeling ACH payments, gathering data on financial transaction, authenticating users’ identity, analyzing customers’ income and revenue streams and assessing creditworthiness, among many others. The key benefit of Plaid, however, lays in its developer-friendly framework, which gives app developers amazing flexibility when creating innovative fintech solution applications. Also, given that Plaid has secured partnerships with thousands of financial institutions across the U.S. and Canada, it gives fintech companies that use Plaid’s API access to a wide network of financial data in these countries, with a guaranteed accuracy of supplied data.

With Plaid, financial transactions are made easier

With Plaid, account authentication for financial transactions between banks is simplified and made extremely easy, as it omits the need for waiting for micro-deposits, and focuses on security a greater user experience. The system offers instantaneous access for authenticating users’ bank accounts and enables more efficiency for transactions.

Real-time balance checks

Plaid enables real-time access to the user’s current balance as well as balance history, which includes information on the account type, account status, and current balance. With such a degree of access to data on bank accounts, Plaid’s API enables services, such as pre-funding of transactions and overdraft prevention. Additionally, such insight enables you to avoid non-sufficient fund fees, significantly reducing the risk of fraud cost.

Asset and Cash flow verification

Plaid gives lending services direct access to reports on customers’ account information, transaction history, and income validity. With direct integration to your software, you are guaranteed to receive real-time information on your customer’s creditability directly from the bank, eliminating risks and shortening waiting times for loans, enabling you to provide your users with swift, user-friendly experience.