Plaid

Plaid is a financial data and payments infrastructure provider founded in 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey and headquartered in San Francisco. It addresses the problem banks, lenders and fintechs face when they need permissioned access to accounts a customer holds at other institutions: instead of manual statement uploads or screen scraping, Plaid supplies one API layer connected to more than 12,000 financial institutions across 20 countries.

The platform groups into data products (Transactions with 24 months of categorised history, Balance, Investments, Liabilities), onboarding and compliance products (Identity Verification, Monitor for AML screening), risk products (Signal for ACH return risk, Beacon and Protect for fraud) and money movement through Transfer, which supports the ACH, RTP and FedNow rails. Plaid states that more than 9,000 fintech applications are built on the network and that over one million connections run through it daily. Typical institutional uses are account verification before a debit, cash-flow based underwriting and account aggregation inside personal finance apps.

1. Transactions API: Returns up to 24 months of categorised transaction and balance history from a linked account.

2. Auth and Balance: Verifies account and routing numbers and checks real-time balance before an ACH debit is submitted.

3. Transfer: Initiates account-to-account money movement over ACH, RTP and FedNow from the same connection.

4. Signal: Scores the probability of an ACH return so a payment can settle instantly or be held.

5. Identity Verification and Monitor: Matches bank-held account-holder data to the submitted identity and screens sanctions and PEP lists.

6. Network reach: Over 12,000 connected financial institutions in 20 countries, serving more than 9,000 fintech applications.