Changelog - 2019 Year in Review

2019 was a big year for us at Plaid—from the Quovo acquisition and the release of exciting new products such as Investments and Liabilities, to our entrance into the European market and the expansion of our data network with Plaid Direct. We also remained focused on strengthening integration health, improving Plaid Link conversions, and providing developers with better tools so they can build best-in-class products.

While we’re excited about what we built in 2019, we look forward to working with our customers to deliver bigger and better things in 2020.

Here are the highlights from what we worked on in 2019:

Europe: We envision a fully inclusive fintech ecosystem that serves everyone, no matter where they bank or live. Throughout 2019, we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress toward achieving this goal. We launched in the United Kingdom and built Open Banking/PSD2 integrations with the top banks and neobanks. Most recently, we launched in France, Spain, and Ireland in beta.

Canada: We continued to expand our support for more Canadian institutions including Desjardins, National Bank of Canada, Vancity, and several Canadian credit unions. We also brought our Investments product to the Canadian market.

Institution Logos: To help you customize your in-app experience and deliver a seamless user experience, we added the ability to retrieve bank logos, colors, and website URLs from the institutions endpoints.

Auth: We made a big stride in enabling account connectivity to any of the ~11,500 banks and credit unions in the U.S. With the new Auth features, your users are automatically guided within Link to the fastest method for connecting their account from any bank or credit union in the US. Additionally, we improved overall Auth data quality with a process that enables us to preemptively identify institutions that provide us with inaccurate account numbers to then triage accordingly.

Transactions: We improved accuracy on transaction categorization, but will be dedicating more resources in 2020 to continue enhancing the Transactions product. You can expect to see new data fields in 2020 as part of the /transactions/get response.

Identity: We enhanced the Identity product by returning account-level identity information, where available, and added support for all student loan servicers that are currently available as part of our Liabilities product.

Investments: We kicked off 2019 with Quovo joining the Plaid family and one of the first initiatives of the newly integrated teams was the launch of Investments. Over the last 6 months, we expanded institution coverage to nearly 1,500 and expanded into Canada to help power healthier financial futures. Most recently, we released developer-friendly updates such as improving the Item Status endpoint to reflect the “last successful update” and "last failed update” of an Investments item.

Liabilities: Fintech has made managing money easier for tens of millions, but we saw a growing need for innovation when it comes to debt management. To help developers and fintech innovators build tools that tackle the debt crisis in America, we introduced our Liabilities product which retrieves account data for student loans and credit cards. In 2020, we’ll be continuing to explore other debt categories, including mortgages.

Link: We continued our efforts to improve Link to deliver even better conversion, and create the best possible experience for users across North America and Europe.

• We released new SDKs on Android and React Native to give your users the most seamless experience, whether they use your services on web, Android, or iOS.

• We made improvements to Link Web that decreased load times by 35%.

• We released account subtype filtering in iOS and web for customers using Liabilities.

If you haven’t yet, check out our latest releases on iOS, Android, and React Native.

Developer tools: Having the right tools can make or break your ability to build the best possible experience with Plaid. This year we released improvements to make your Plaid integration more transparent and easier to troubleshoot.

• Institution status allows you to see real-time data on Plaid’s bank integrations via the API or Dashboard, including the success rates of Transactions, Balance, Auth, and Identity updates.

• Event logs enable customer support teams to look under the hood and easily view API requests and webhook events directly in the Dashboard.

• Sandbox improvements allow you to test webhooks on demand and customize account data, to better test your integration across use cases and Plaid products.

• An improved system status page displays the uptime of our three API environments.

• New Dashboard improvements help you better manage teams from one Plaid account.

Plaid Direct: We took another step in delivering increased access to the financial system with Plaid Direct, a lightweight integration spec that enables neobanks, digital wallets, fintech brokerages, and financial institutions to become supported in the Plaid data network. Now, the growing number of users at companies like Chime, Varo, Aspiration, and Mercury can connect their accounts to the world of financial apps that use Plaid.

API Version: We released API version 2019.05.29 to enable European institution coverage and provide nomenclature and schema updates required by Identity and future products.