Product Updates - April 2025

Dapree Doyle
Product Marketing Manager

We’ve shipped a number of updates across Plaid in April - from streamlined cash flow insights and smarter fraud tools to simpler setup in the dashboard, we’re focused on helping you build better financial products with less effort. For all the latest product updates, check out our API changelog.

Here are the highlights of what’s new—and what’s improved—across key Plaid products.

Products and Solutions:

Featured products: Auth, Identity

What’s new:

• ✅ Account Verification Dashboard: You can now configure Auth methods and Identity Match rules via the dashboard —reducing implementation time and simplifying ongoing management.

Featured products: Consumer Report

What’s better:

•  🔗 Streamlined user experience: Plaid will pre-fill a user’s phone number in Link using information from the consumer_report_user_identity object if the phone number is not pre-filled via /link/token/create. Pre-filling phone numbers can help boost conversion while reducing steps for users.

• ⚡ Faster access to cash flow insights: We made optimizations to reduce the average time it takes for Plaid to create a new Consumer Report by 25%. As a result, you’ll be able to retrieve Base Report and Income Insights in less time.

• 🛠️ Improved visibility into errors: We updated error codes for /get endpoint responses and added details on Item errors to help you easily understand what caused a data request to fail.

• 📈 User statuses in the Credit Dashboard: We added more visibility for user statuses when they are connecting their accounts via Link. This includes showing the error messages that users are encountering in Link.

Featured products: Identity Verification, Signal

What’s new:

• 👥 Facial matching across your user base: Now, you can use Plaid IDV’s facial matching to automatically detect repeat signups and fraudulent activity across your platform. By cataloging ID portraits and liveness sessions, our system compares faces with accuracy—achieving a 1 in 1 million false match rate. Apply matching across your entire user base or fine-tune it for specific use cases, giving you greater control over fraud prevention.

• 🛠️  Enhanced risk configuration in Plaid IDV Editor: We released a new setting that lets you fail users based on their overall Plaid Trust Index, our holistic user trust score, adding to the existing individual risk category controls. This gives you even more protection and more flexibility to fine-tune your fraud prevention strategy.

• 🔍 More granular controls for the Signal dashboard: We introduced flexible dashboard controls to ensure risk management stays in the right hands. All team members can track performance, while only approved members can edit rules—giving risk teams full control while keeping permissions simple and scalable.

What’s better:

• ⚡ Signal real-time backtesting support: Previously, it took up to 2 days for /signal/evaluate activity to be reflected in your Signal Rules' performance metrics. Now, it's real-time, allowing you to react faster to ACH return trends.

Featured products: Layer

What’s new:

• 📢 Authentication Webhook for Layer: We added a highly requested webhook, LAYER_AUTHENTICATION_PASSED, that notifies you when authentication has passed. This is useful for determining whether a user who dropped off mid-Layer session should go through your SMS OTP process or if it can be skipped because authentication already occurred in the abandoned session.

What’s better:

• 🔄 Updated Layer Integration: We introduced /session/token/create, a new and streamlined token creation endpoint, that simply takes in a template ID. The template ID is obtained from the Layer template editor in the dashboard, where all Layer flow settings are configured. This simplifies implementation for your developers, and gives you the ability to make changes on the fly with no code, directly from our dashboard.

Featured products: Data Access

What’s new:

• 🔄 Seamless API to API migrations: We released a new integration migration capability called Backend Token Exchange (BTE) that allows Plaid to complete API to API migrations without disruption. This capability is now being used with a leading data provider who successfully migrated millions of Items to OAuth without users having to login to their accounts again. All future API to API migrations are eligible for BTE if data providers choose to adopt this capability.

What's better:

• ✅ Improved conversion for Vanguard: We completed the migration of Vanguard to OAuth on February 19th, driving more successful user account linkages and boosting conversion rates since going live.

• 🛠️ Reduced integration fix times by 98%: We launched a new integration infrastructure tool that resulted in a 98% reduction in time to deploy fix times on non-API integrations.

Featured products: Investments

What’s better:

• 🗂️ Robust transaction categorization: We fine-tuned our ability to distinguish between "buys" and "contributions" in 401(k) transactions, across numerous data providers.

• 👀 More accurate account subtypes: We refined the accuracy of account subtypes, giving you a clearer picture of your users’ type of investment accounts. 

What’s new: 

• 🧾 Split billing across business units: You can now allocate API usage across business units via API headers within a single client_id. Contact your Plaid Account Manager for more details. 

• 🔐 Configurable SAML Roles: We made it possible to configure Plaid Dashboard roles via SAML. Contact your Plaid Account Manager for more details. This feature is only available if you’re on a premium platform support package.  

What's better:

• 🔗 Easily switch teams in the dashboard: You can now bookmark a team specific link instead of having to manually switch to them every time in the dashboard. Use the new query parameter, activeTeam, on any page in the dashboard if you want to bookmark a page for a specific team.