Plaid
Description
Plaid is a financial data network that connects applications to their users' bank accounts. Businesses use it to read account and transaction data from thousands of banks and credit unions.
Setup guide
Follow this setup guide to connect Plaid to Improvado.
- Your Plaid account needs Production access with the Transactions product enabled.
- One connection reads one bank login that its owner linked through Plaid Link in your application. Plaid calls it an Item. You need the access token of that Item.
Click the Connections in the left navigation bar.
Categories on the Data sources page group all available platforms. Use a search to find the required one.
Click on the Plaid tile.
In a separate tab, sign in to the Plaid Dashboard and open the Keys page. Copy your client_id and your Production secret.
Get the access token of the bank login you want to connect:
- If your application uses Plaid Link, take the access_token that your application received from Plaid for this bank login when it exchanged the public token.
- If you do not have such an application, run Plaid Quickstart with your Production keys, link the bank on the Quickstart page and copy the access_token it shows.
A Production access token starts with access-production-.
Back in Improvado, fill in the connection form:
- Client ID - your Plaid client_id from Step 3.
- Secret - your Plaid Production secret from Step 3.
- Access Token - the access token from Step 4.
- Each access token is one bank login. To connect another bank login, add another connection with its access token.
Click Connect. After the connection completes successfully, the Plaid connection appears in your Connected sources list. Its name contains the bank name and the Plaid Item ID.
When the connection status is Active, you can move on to data extraction. Each bank account of the bank login is a separate account, named after the account and the last digits of its number.
To extract data from the connected source, follow the instructions on how to set up data extraction.
Schema information
The schema information shows all report types you can use to extract data from Plaid.
Limits
Transaction history
Plaid stores up to 24 months of transactions for a bank login. How far back you can extract depends on how much history Plaid collected when Transactions was first enabled for that login: 90 days, unless your application asked for more when linking the bank. If Transactions is not enabled for the login yet, Improvado asks Plaid for the maximum of 24 months.
Pending transactions
A pending transaction can change or be replaced by its posted version for up to 14 days. Every extraction re-reads the last 14 days, so the data follows these changes.
Account types
Plaid provides transactions for depository accounts (such as checking and savings), credit cards, student loans and mortgages. Investment accounts appear in the account list, but Plaid does not provide their transactions.
Release notes
You can find information about the latest API changes in Plaid's official changelog.
Troubleshooting
Having trouble with your setup? Find solutions to common issues →
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