Enhancing Liabilities with credit card details

In July, we introduced a new Liabilities product that provides developers access to more granular, real-time information about what consumers owe, starting with their student loans. Now we've added support for credit card details so developers can continue building better debt management solutions.

No debt category impacts more Americans than credit cards. An estimated 41%¹ of households carry credit card debt. To give you a sense of the scale, there are 480 million cards in use², averaging 2.7 cards per person.³ With the average person carrying a balance of $5,700¹, all this credit card debt amounts to over $1 trillion.⁴ And with the holiday season just around the corner, the burden of credit card debt will likely worsen.

Plaid has always provided details about credit card transactions so that people could better manage their cash flow. With this update, Plaid will return more details about the terms and payment due dates. Check out the features that come with it below and in our API docs!

Liabilities - Credit Cards

Now, in addition to student loans, developers can retrieve real-time information about credit card accounts to help borrowers understand their financial obligations, consolidate debt across accounts for more favorable terms, and pay down balances faster.

Once consumers connect their credit card account(s), developers can retrieve the following data:

• Terms: APR type, APR percentage, interest charge amount, and balance subject to APR

• Payment details: last payment date and amount, next payment due date, minimum payment amount, and more

• Balances: last statement balance and issue date, and credit limit

An early beta tester, Charlie uses artificial intelligence to send timely and actionable financial alerts to help consumers save and better manage their money.

Staying on top of your credit card payments is a foundational element of financial health. Plaid’s credit card data allows Charlie to meet this central user need. It was nice to get APR details for standard purchases, cash advances, and balance transfers separately. Most users do not know there is a difference and are often surprised. - Ivo Parashkevov, Co-founder of Charlie

Account Subtype Filtering for Link iOS & Web

To help developers provide a seamless experience for their users, we've introduced account subtype filtering feature for Link iOS and Web. Developers can choose to only show student loan servicers or credit card institutions in the Institution Select pane. At the moment, account subtype filtering is only available for Liabilities. Review our API docs to see how to configure Link.

Getting started

Both student loan and credit card data are available through /liabilities/get in the Sandbox, Development, and Production environments. If you haven’t already, sign up for a free account to begin testing. For access to our Development or Production environment to test with real accounts, reach out to Sales or your Account Manager.

In the coming months, we’ll continue to add more debt categories to help you build even better solutions for tackling the consumer debt crisis.

¹MarketWatch, 2019, ‘A growing number of Americans have more credit-card debt than savings’
² Bloomberg, 2019, ‘U.S. Credit Card Debt Closed 2018 at a Record $870 Billion’
³ Credit Karma, 2019, ‘How many credit cards does the average American have?’
⁴ CNBC, 2019, ‘Consumer debt hits $4 trillion’