September 10, 2025
Cutting Costs and Complexity in Open Finance with Plaid
Every day, millions of customers connect their bank accounts to apps for budgeting, payments, investing, and more. Banks have a choice in how they enable those connections. Many financial institutions have partnered with Plaid because we deliver customer experiences that are user friendly, always available, and privacy-protecting, while also giving banks the right controls and visibility.
With Plaid’s technical architecture, banks reduce cost and complexity without sacrificing oversight. We’ve built infrastructure that delivers efficiency for bank systems and transparency into how customer data is shared, setting the standard for permissioned data access that reduces redundant traffic while allowing banks to maintain visibility in open finance.
Scale that powers efficiency
Plaid powers connections for over 150 million consumers across 12,000+ financial institutions. On average, more than 750,000 new connections to Plaid-powered applications are made every single day, nearly 10 every second. Many of those connections involve the same user linking multiple applications to the same bank.
At Plaid’s scale, redundant API calls can create unnecessary infrastructure load for banks. That’s why we built Aggregator Token and proprietary traffic management controls, a system that consolidates user-permissioned connections so your infrastructure does not need to support redundant API calls for the same data with the same user permissions.
Think about Jane, a typical customer who uses multiple financial apps:
App A (Budgeting app): needs both balances and transactions
App B (Spending insights app): needs transactions to analyze spending
App C (Recurring payment app): needs balances to prevent ACH returns
Jane links each app individually.
Without Aggregator Token:
App A triggers two API calls (balances + transactions).
App B triggers another API call for transactions.
App C triggers another API call for balances.
That’s four separate API calls hitting the bank’s systems, with two of them being redundant.
With Plaid’s Aggregator Token:
Plaid requests balances + transactions from the bank once.
Apps A, B, and C access the data that they received permissions for.
The bank only gets two unique calls instead of four.
The impact:
Jane’s experience doesn’t change — she still links each app directly.
The bank’s infrastructure load is cut nearly in half: fewer redundant calls, lower costs, and smoother performance at scale.
This is the power of Plaid’s Aggregator Token: as customers connect more apps, the efficiency gains compound. What would otherwise be multiple overlapping calls to your systems becomes a single call, pulling permissioned data that’s shared securely across apps.
The results are clear:
Better customer experience → fewer broken connections for end users
Less traffic → up to 40–50% fewer API calls to bank systems
Lower costs → reduced infrastructure and support overhead
Smoother operations → balanced traffic that avoids spikes and outages
Maintain transparency and governance
Plaid is built to ensure that banks have control over their data-out APIs, with full transparency into which apps customers connect to, what data is being shared, and when.
Through Plaid’s Data Partner Dashboard, banks can:
Gain visibility into every app connection
Track exactly what data is shared, with whom, and when
Offer end users the ability to view and unlink apps through consent management tools
Monitor connection health and trends at scale
All of these capabilities are available for use in the dashboard or via API.
Why this matters
With Plaid, open finance doesn’t have to be a tradeoff between efficiency and control. With the right optimization, you can have:
Efficiency: Fewer API calls, smoother traffic, lower costs
Visibility: Transparent governance, app oversight, connection- and app-level insights
Control: Tools to manage data sharing and give customers the ability to unlink apps
Trust: An ecosystem you can rely on, even as you scale
We’ve built the infrastructure that helps banks govern data access, reduce risk, and optimize traffic efficiency, all while ensuring you stay in control of your open finance program.
Want to learn how to optimize your traffic? Reach out to your Data Partner Representative or connect with us at openfinance@plaid.com.