May & June Changelog

Al Cook
Chief Marketing Officer, Plaid

Bringing Plaid’s products to market and telling impactful stories about digital finance around the world, Al leads our go-to-market strategy, marketing, comms, and brand teams at Plaid.

In case you missed Threads 2023, we launched a number of enhancements to our flagship products like Identity Verification, Link, and new products like Plaid Beacon. But that’s not all. As summer heats up, so are our new products, features, and fixes.

Featured product: Link

What's new:

🔗 More Institution logos: Connecting accounts is a piece of cake. With our improved institution pane layout, we've made it effortless for over 5% more users to find their banks without needing to use the search function. That's one less step and precious time saved!

🔍 Improved search: Looking for your institution? We’ve made a few optimizations to the search function, so users can quickly locate their bank, leading to a nice bump in conversion rates.

🌎 Link goes global: Enhanced link language localization for Germany and France.

🔄 Streamlined OAuth guidance: New instructions will guide users to successfully connect their accounts from Capital One, Chase, Wells Fargo, and US Bank. We’ve tailored them to the institution’s requirements and the Plaid products that you’re using. For example, if Link is initialized with Auth, we’ll tell the user to select their checking or savings account, and share their account and routing numbers before they start the OAuth flow.

What’s improved:

🔗 Reduced latency: Optimized the order in which product data is extracted, so latency is reduced by ~75% for customers who are using multiple products in a Link session.

Featured products: Auth, Balance, Identity, Signal, Transfer

What’s new:

🏦 A better funding experience: Microdeposits can be a pain. If we recognize a routing number that a user types in, we’ll redirect them to their bank sign-in page for greater fraud prevention and conversion. 

👩‍🔬 A new Signal Dashboard: No dedicated data scientists? No problem. Now, you can optimize your payment flows, all inside Plaid! Scenario test decisioning strategies, review key ACH metrics, and explore the "why" behind your return risk scores. 

👀 Identity Match: It’s now much easier to verify ownership of linked bank accounts. We’ll now provide you with a score on how likely the identity information on the linked bank account matches with the identity information of the user customers have on file. In early testing, we’ve seen high scores when compared to a trained human reviewer: over 99% precision and 98% recall.

What’s better:

⚡️ Faster risk decisions:  We made improvements to the /signal/evaluate endpoint so you get scores and attributes 50% faster. Turbocharge your payment risk decisions and speed up payouts, without the excessive holds.  

📄 Improved customer sweep reconciliation. We've taken the hassle out of recognizing sweeps on bank statements. Now, sweeps are conveniently tagged with shortened identifiers through a company entry description, making them easily identifiable. With the shortened identifier, you can effortlessly gather sweep information using our dashboard or API endpoints. The sweeps are also listed by amount, providing you with more options for straightforward reconciliation of funds received by Plaid Transfer.

🔎 New updates to our Payouts API: To help make Payouts easier and more convenient, we’ve added more granular errors, payment rails info, and ingestion of date of birth and address to reduce the likelihood of Request For Information.

Featured products: Liabilities, Investments, Transactions

What’s better:

📍 Location fill rate boost:  Help your customers keep track of their transactions with our improved location fill rate! We've added more street addresses and precise lat/lon coordinates, plus advanced analytics for crystal-clear clarity.

🤖 AI-Enabled merchant recognition:  Identifying merchants has never been easier, thanks to our brand-new automated AI pipeline. See a speedy expansion of our merchant database, with new merchants added on an ongoing basis.

💼 Income source parsing: Delve deeper into your customers' income sources with our latest update. "Income_source" is a new counterparty type, which will return the payer in an income transaction (e.g., an employer, client, or government agency).

🎯 New Investments categorizations for Robinhood: Save time and effort with more accurate classifying options as derivatives and returning strike price, contract type, and expiry date right within the security name. 

Featured products: Core Exchange, Integrations

What’s new:

📊 Data partner dashboard redesign: Discovering our Open Finance solutions and navigating our features is a walk in the park.  Use our revamped dashboard to find what you need in just a few clicks.

What’s better:

🔗 New institutions: We’ve added support for Wisely and Mountain America Credit Union so you can now link these accounts in a jiffy. 

Featured products: Identity Verification, Monitor

What’s new:

🛑 An anti-fraud consortium: We launched Beacon, our new anti-fraud network. Most fraud is repeat fraud, happening across multiple companies. By combining fraud insights across the Plaid network of fintechs and financial institutions, participants can more effectively fight fraud.

📲💨 One-click identity verification: Say hello to a faster identity verification experience. We’ve added a new feature that allows returning users to save their verified identities with Plaid to fast track their future verification on other Plaid-powered apps. Check it out.

💼 Bank account ownership: Need to make sure a bank account belongs to the right owner? Plaid Identity Verification now automatically checks bank account ownership if used with Plaid Identity. We’ll help you check off the boxes, so you can make sure that someone isn’t linking a bank account that doesn’t belong to them. 

🔎 Synthetic and Stolen Identity signals: We’ve added more signals to our risk engine to help  you identify synthetic IDs or stolen IDs. These all run in the background to help you power anti-fraud without any work needed. Configure your risk settings in the dashboard just like our other checks.

📲 Entered the wrong phone number? No worries. Now your users can edit their phone number on the SMS OTP input screen even if they’ve made a mistake. 

👨🏻‍💻 We love low-friction experiences: Looking to create retry sessions for your existing users? They can now send any PII they already have via API to identity_verification/retry. Hooray for better customer experiences!

What's better:

📲 An additional data source:  Cheers to better reliability and resilience of IDV. 

🤳 Download URLs from selfie check: Need to see a video feed (or still image fallback)? It’s easy to find the links in the API response from identity_verification/get.

📊 Improved validations: We’re applying checksums during submission for Chinese Resident Numbers.

⌨️ Autofill: Enjoy improved reliability. 

🧑🏼‍💻 Navigate the dashboard with ease:  Switch between IDV and other product pages quickly.

🌎 Country selector: Looking for your country? We’ve made it more intuitive with an improved UI.

📱 Support for all devices: We’ve upgraded performance for documentary verification, which improves the experience for older devices. 

What's fixed:

🖥 IDV background processing: Fixed an issue where a vendor’s backend caused it to fail due to an unexpected status. 

🚫 Clearer error messages: Uploaded a logo that’s too large in the Identity Verification flow editor? No worries. We’ve explained how to fix the issue.  

Featured products: Income, Assets

What’s new:

🛑 Fraud no more: Worried about the authenticity of customer-uploaded bank statements? Fret not! Our Document Income product retrieves income information and detects potential fraud with precision. Currently available in beta. Learn more 

⌚ Real-time Income data: Get ready for a game-changer. Stay updated with real-time insights into your customers' income status. Our new Bank Income Refresh fetches the latest reports and sends you notifications when it's time to refresh. Currently available in beta. 

🔗 Hosted Link: Unlock the power of on-demand lending experiences. Gone are the days of building your own front-end app experience. Hosted Link offers you Plaid Link through a convenient hosted URL so you can verify income and assets wherever your customers are. 

📋 Financial Insights Report: Get a bird’s eye view of your borrowers’ finances with our new Financial Insights Report, which allows our UK and Europe customers to embed open banking data into their underwriting flows including credit categories, risk indicators, historical transactions, and more. 

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