August product updates: Faster onboarding & stronger identity verification

Tiffany Ha
Product Marketing Manager

This month’s updates are all about speed and accuracy—built to help you securely onboard users faster, verify identities with more confidence, and make smarter credit decisions. With improved income insights and DMV-backed ID checks, you can now deliver better experiences in less time using real-time data.

This Month's Featured Highlight

Here’s a look at our launches and enhancements from July.

Featured products: Auth, Identity, Transfer

What’s better:

• ⏩ Faster account connections for more users: We expanded Instant Auth coverage to 500+ more financial institutions. That means more users can connect accounts instantly which can boost conversion and reduce drop-off.

• 🆔 Easier access to verified identity data: Identity now supports 450+ additional institutions. You’ll get easier access to verified account holder data—including name, address, phone number, and email.

• ✅ Improved reconciliation with Transfer: Transfer customers can now use the API to pull event history from Ledger—no dashboard download required.

Featured products: Consumer Report

What’s better:

• 📍Improved accuracy of income categorization and insights: With your feedback in mind, we’ve shipped key updates to the income insights provided by Consumer Report. These include:

  • Income categorization: We introduced new regex rules with a focus on more precise filtering of loan disbursements and internal transfers, and increasing recall for gig economy and rental income.

  • Historical average monthly income: We updated how this field is calculated using the total number of days requested by you or as far back as the income stream is available.

  • Forecasted monthly income: We modified eligibility for this field to more closely align with eligibility for historical average monthly income. If historical averages show $0 for an income stream, then we will return $0 for the forecasted income.

Featured products: IDV

What’s new:

• 🚗 Stronger identity verification with DMV checks: For higher risk consumers that need step-up authentication, you can now verify their driver license number directly with Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to ensure authenticity. Existing Plaid IDV customers simply need to toggle on this feature within the editor to start using it.

Featured products: Layer, Link 

What’s better:  

• ⚡ Instant onboarding, now for everyone: We expanded Layer to help more users start their journey in seconds—even if they’ve never used Plaid before. If a user’s in the network, we still route them through our fastest flow with instant identity and account linking. If not, they’ll still get a streamlined onboarding experience with their identity data autofilled in real-time within Layer’s intuitive UI. No new integration needed. Just smarter onboarding, for every user.

• ✨  A fresh new look for Link: We rolled out a design refresh for Link to reflect Plaid’s new brand identity. This includes modernized UI elements and refreshed icons that bring a cleaner, more cohesive experience to your users.

• 🧭 Improved conversion from progress bars: As part of the Link design refresh we added a visual progress bar to Link that shows users how many steps are left to complete. This simple addition helps reduce drop-off and has already driven a 1% relative lift in Plaid-wide conversion in testing.

Featured products: Dashboard

What’s better: 

• 🤝 Improved OAuth registration: We’ve revamped the registration experience to help new customers avoid delays and access top institutions faster. Registration now starts earlier and shows real-time statuses, requirements, and actionable errors in the Dashboard, so you can set clear timeline expectations and launch with full coverage in place.

Take a look at the full list of updates in our API changelog.