Every onboarding flow involves a tricky balance: ask for too much too soon, and legitimate users bail before they've even tried your product. Ask for too little, and you're left without the data you need to verify who someone is or do business with them safely. On top of all that, the optimal flow varies depending on each company’s goals for conversion and verification.
Plaid Layer is an award winning product that helps businesses balance these tradeoffs by giving users instant financial onboarding experiences without compromising on fraud or trust. Every month, over a million users open accounts and sign up for new apps using Plaid Layer.
Today, we’re sharing two updates that make Layer even more flexible to suit your onboarding flow:
Modularity – your business can now decide exactly when identity and bank data are collected from users, without having to choose between Layer’s speed and your ideal user journey
Identity verification within Layer – seamlessly run KYC, verify identity documents, and orchestrate Identity Verification checks within the same session
If you're already using Layer, your account management team can help you get access to these option. If you're new to Layer, here's a quick primer before we get into what's changed.
What is Plaid Layer?
Layer is Plaid's instant onboarding product. Instead of asking every new user to type in their name, address, and bank details, Layer checks whether someone's already on the Plaid network using just their phone number. If they are, we’ll let them share identity and bank information they've already saved with Plaid in a single tap. The Layer network now has over 67 million remembered users – 49% growth from this time last year.
For eligible users, that means skipping the cumbersome parts: retyping an address, digging up a bank login, re-uploading a document. For the businesses using Layer, it means higher conversion – anywhere from 5% to 25% uplift.
Modular Layer: onboarding that fits your funnel
Until now, Layer worked as a single, all-in-one step: identity and bank information on one pane, shared in one click. That's fast – often less than 15 seconds – but it doesn't fit every onboarding flow, especially if you don’t need a bank account from every customer, or worry that asking them to share it too early will cause drop-off.
So, we’ve made Layer modular, which means you get to decide when users are prompted to share their saved bank account:
Alongside their identity, via the classic one-click Layer experience
Or later in the onboarding flow, only when you need it. Two clicks, but still instant
Plaid carries user and device context between steps, so you can pre-fill identity via Layer, drop the customer back into your flow, and then launch Layer again when you’re ready to collect a bank account. When you do, we’ll run a series of device and risk checks to ensure we can securely silently re-authenticate the user. If not, we’ll step the user up to SMS OTP before they can share their saved bank account.
In practice, a modular Layer session looks like this:
The level of flexibility is especially valuable to companies that prioritize growth, want to reduce abandonment rates, or prefer to defer the bank account linking step. Customers benefit by:
Reducing early drop-off and improving conversion: Collect identity data up front and asking for a bank account only when the moment's right.
Customizing to your use case: Test new sequences to optimize conversion, without re-architecting your onboarding stack each time.
Authenticating without friction: Do through silent network checks and SMS verification, only when needed.
Letting users edit what's already prefilled: Users review and correct a pre-filled identity profile instead of filling one out from scratch.
All of this runs on the Layer integration you already have. And if you'd rather keep asking for everything in one pane, that classic, all-in-one Layer experience isn't going anywhere.
Instant onboarding and identity verification, in one
For most businesses, improving conversion doesn’t stop with reducing friction for users. It includes constantly tuning anti-fraud checks, orchestrating step-ups, navigating evolving compliance requirements, and integrating solutions across several vendors.
We’ve made it easier than ever to verify Plaid’s returning users by integrating access to Plaid Identity Verification into Layer.
During Layer sessions with IDV, you can now:
Silently run datasource verification, with no extra screens or user input.
Seamlessly collect and verify identity documents. If the user has saved an ID to their Plaid account – they can share and verify it in as little as one tap, no new photo required.
Orchestrate risk-based step-ups to document verification.
Here's how a session looks with identity verification built in:
Your users get a seamless, conversion-optimized user experience – even when documents are required – and your team gets to review sessions from the Plaid IDV dashboard they already know. This means you can still have seamless onboarding experiences while minimizing fraud.
That adds up to real gains:
Run three checks with zero repeated steps: Authenticate the phone number, run KYC, and verify ID documents in one flow, with the fewest possible clicks.
Configure step-ups as needed: Update how your onboarding flow responds to evolving fraud threats directly from your dashboard, without writing a line of code.
Get a holistic view of who you're doing business with: See identity checks and bank data from the same session in a single dashboard view instead of piecing together results across separate solutions and vendors.
Fewer trade-offs, more control
Modularity and identity verification fit the philosophy that Plaid Layer should fit how your onboarding flow actually works. Whether that means asking for a bank account later in your funnel, or seamlessly running anti-fraud step-ups, both updates are about giving you the flexibility to make that call — without giving up the speed Layer is built on.
If you're already using Layer, reach out to your account manager if you’re interested in either of these enhancements. If you're not yet, learn more about Plaid Layer or talk to our team to see how it fits your onboarding flow.