Highlights from Day 2 at Plaid Forum

New tools to help you go from 0 to 1 and scale as quickly as possible

We wrapped Plaid Forum today with the important things we’re doing to improve your developer experience. Specifically, we focused on the tools that make it easy for new developers to go from zero to one and for existing developers to scale even faster. We covered improvements we’ve made to the Dashboard, new Plaid Pattern apps, new OAuth resources, new Client Libraries and a new product that helps lenders get started with ACH transfers. Here are the highlights from today: 

New tools to accelerate fintech launches 

For those who are building a new fintech app, the possibilities are almost endless and it’s extremely exciting. We want to help you conceptualize how Plaid’s products can make your app come to life and inspire you with real examples. That's why we launched Plaid Pattern sample apps, which illustrate how Plaid can power end-to-end app experiences for both personal financial management and account funding use cases. These sample apps are designed to provide real-world, robust best-practice examples for you to build with Plaid, including error handling, webhook integration, Link update mode, and OAuth support. Now you don’t need to imagine, just experience! Find the right Pattern app for your use case here: PFM and account funding. 

Once you are ready, we have new tools to help you jump start building with Plaid. We recently released our API spec in the OpenAPI format, so it’s easier for you to generate libraries, code snippets, and test tooling. Now, no matter what programming language you use, you can be up and running with Plaid faster and easier. To get started with new client libraries, check out our GitHub.

Making it easier and faster to get started with ACH transfers

In speaking to many developers in the lending space, we learned that integrating ACH can be particularly challenging. This includes having to manage operational challenges, multiple vendors and processes that can really slow down the process of building and launching your apps and services. To support this growing segment of developers, we are launching Plaid Transfer, a complete ACH solution in beta today for lenders who are just starting out. 

Transfer enables you to authorize customers securely, analyze risk associated with the transaction, and get insights on your transactions–all in one. It’s powered by Plaid Auth and Signal, and comes with a conversion-optimized front end to give you a best-in-class user experience. This provides everything you need to start initiating ACH payments quickly and supports you before, during and after the transaction is complete. With Transfer, our goal is to minimize the complexity of integrating ACH so that you can focus on building great lending experiences for your customers and launch your apps and services quickly and easily. Transfer is launching in beta and is now available to startup lenders so let us know if you are interested.

Growing with Plaid is more effortless than ever

New developer Dashboard updates make it easier to support your customers

Today, the developer Dashboard is your single source of truth for institution status when you’re looking to resolve issues for your customers. A few months ago, we rolled out three new metrics to help make the troubleshooting experience a lot more efficient. 

First, we rolled out a new view on each institution’s individual Status page showing the connection health over the past two weeks for Plaid products including Auth, Identity, Investments, Liabilities, and Transactions. Within that two-week-period, you can hover over the graph to see connectivity status of a specific day and hour. This enables you to provide better support for your customers whether they experienced a connectivity issue yesterday or even a week ago.

Second, the new transaction data freshness metric showcases when items for a particular institution were last updated. This is incredibly important for personal financial management use cases as more and more of your customers expect to see their account activity, from credit card spend to payroll deposits, updated regularly and reflected in their apps quickly. Our customers who are already using this new metric found it useful in helping them determine where transaction delays may have occurred so they can adapt their product experience and better communicate with their customers.

Last but not least, we’re continuing to make improvements to the customer experience of our Investments product by adding Investments institutions connectivity status to the Dashboard. Now, you’ll be able to support your customers who rely on Investments to help them manage and grow their wealth by helping them troubleshoot connectivity issues better.

Even more transparent and helpful messaging in Plaid Link for consumers

Not only are we surfacing comprehensive connectivity status in developer Dashboard to help you support your customers better, we also added institution connectivity information directly in Link to make troubleshooting more real-time and self-serve for your customers. ​​If your customer’s selected institution is incompatible or experiencing unstable connectivity, we provide proactive messaging in Link to encourage them to try again, connect another institution, or check for another connection method. This update is designed to lighten your customer service team’s workload.

More tools to help you scale with reliable access to data

Migrating to bank APIs and OAuth can help ensure long term access to reliable data and we want to make this process straightforward for you. To do that, we rolled out new features that will make the migration experience simple and smooth. First, we improved our Sandbox environment to provide a sample bank’s OAuth flow. Now, you can test your integration using a test OAuth institution that we’ve created and see how the handoff from your app to the OAuth flow will function. We built this to work with existing integration tests you may be using already. Give it a try in your Sandbox environment. Second, your Plaid Dashboard is your one-stop shop to see and complete the non-technical pre-work required to onboard onto bank APIs and OAuth. Check out the OAuth Institutions page to see outstanding tasks - like the Security questionnaire - and view which bank APIs have been enabled for your app.

Happy building!

Thank you so much for joining us over the last two days. Our goal is to give you the building blocks to build, grow, and scale your apps and services with us. It’s been an incredible year to see the growth of fintech and how your products and services have impacted consumers everywhere. I’m humbled to get to build alongside all of you. 

As I’ve mentioned, our roadmap is set by you and for you, so please continue to share your feedback with us or DM me directly - I’d love to hear from you. 

To see the full Plaid Forum day 2 experience, watch the recording here.   
If you missed Plaid Forum day 1, watch the recording here.