April 15, 2025
Unlock financial experiences with insightful transaction data using the Plaid network
Think about the last time a financial app really understood you. Maybe it flagged a potential overspending issue before it happened, or offered a timely cash advance just when you needed it most. That's the power of real-time, insightful transaction data. Whether you're building a budgeting tool or providing instant financial relief, this level of insight is the key to creating experiences that resonate and keep users coming back. With Plaid, you can move beyond reactive features and start anticipating your users’ needs, delivering truly personalized and timely financial experiences.
Join us as we delve into how Plaid leverages the scale of its network to provide the foundation for these impactful interactions, supporting your efforts from acquiring new users to driving ongoing engagement with your platform.
Acquire more users
Before you can offer these personalized financial experiences, users need to successfully connect their financial accounts to your application or service. Plaid has spent a decade perfecting this critical step with Plaid Link, establishing industry-leading connectivity to over 12,000 financial institutions globally. Our broad coverage enables users to link their accounts, regardless of where they bank. Whether it’s one of the largest banks in the country, a digital-first bank, or a local credit union, our goal is to ensure your users can connect their account of choice to your app or service.
Relied on by 1 in 2 U.S. consumers with a bank account, chances are your users have used Plaid Link to connect their financial accounts with apps and services before. Even though these users are new to your app, many of them may have opted into being remembered by Plaid, which means they see a more streamlined account connection experience. This returning user experience has generated conversion gains north of 7% for our top personal financial management customers. That means more users through your front door when you use Plaid.
Lastly, because Plaid handles 600,000 new data connections daily, we see trends that impact how easily users connect their accounts. For example, even the large financial institutions that provide standardized Open Banking APIs have different end user authentication experiences that result in varying success rates. To address this, we provide customized messaging to guide the user through the authentication process, improving conversion by as much as 5% for a test we ran with one such large financial institution. This kind of attention to detail and our proactive way of making things clear for your users is what helps you ultimately acquire more users.
Get clear, insightful transaction data
Once you’ve connected a user’s bank account, you can unlock the transaction data needed to power your use case. But, have you ever looked at your recent card statement and not been able to recognize the purchases at all? That’s because raw transaction data is messy and inconsistent, with formats varying wildly between institutions. For example, the same transaction from Brew Blossom Cafe could look like any of the following across different institutions when you first receive it:
So how do you accurately identify the merchant, categorize the spend, and understand the true intent of the transaction for your users? Plaid enriches transaction data for you, with cleansed merchant names, categories, counterparty information, locations, and more—significantly reducing the time required for your team to make use of the data. We enrich 500M+ transactions daily across our network, ensuring we constantly improve our model’s ability to generate the most accurate outputs and insights for our customers.
So instead of interpreting mumble jumble, you’ll receive a clean and accurate description from Plaid, much like the below:
It doesn’t stop there. If you’ve ever tried to track a single transaction, you’d know that they’re always changing. Statuses shift from pending to approved, descriptions are altered, and amounts are adjusted (like when a restaurant tip is added), leaving you with multiple inputs to reconcile. In fact, we looked at a sample of transactions that moved from pending to posted and found that 80% of transactions had either the description or amount changed.
Plaid helps our customers tackle this problem with our Transactions Sync feature, which delivers a streamlined view of added, modified, or removed transactions. We provide these updates typically every six hours—so our customers can have the most fresh and accurate data in the market.
Provide uninterrupted experiences
Once you’ve onboarded the user, received transaction data, and made sense of it all, how do you ensure the experience you’re providing is uninterrupted? No one wants to use a personal finance app where their data doesn’t get updated in real-time.
Because of the volume of connections happening over Plaid’s network every day, our vantage point allows us to stay ahead of potential issues and ensure reliable connectivity for your users. In the case where technical issues cause your customer's connections to fail across many applications, we've built a new capability to streamline fixing all of their relevant connections with fewer actions required from them. Getting ahead of connection issues can save you from customer support overhead while keeping your customers happy.
Bring your use cases to life
Simply having and maintaining the data isn't enough. Turning it into personalized, actionable insights that power your use case is a major challenge. How do you understand your users’ financial behaviors and use that information to help both your users and your business?
Many personal financial management tools use Plaid's categorized data, merchant detection, and recurring subscription detection to provide the foundation for spending insights, budgeting tools, and comprehensive net worth tracking. But it doesn’t stop there. Plaid allows these customers to easily increase their personalization and engagement with their users while improving their financial health.
For instance, SoFi’s “Insights” feature can help members see where they’re overspending or identify a cash account that could generate more income if switched to a high-yield savings account.
Lending Tree uses Plaid to provide “sticky” solutions for their users like budgeting tips that have helped them become a financial hub.
Plaid also powers Earned Wage Access, enabling businesses to use transaction data to detect income and provide cash advances. Brigit relies on Plaid to track transactions, predict bill coverage, and offer interest-free cash advances. This helps end users access cash faster and often helps them cover their expenses for the next 4 or 5 days. Understanding the transaction category (like income) is essential for Brigit—they saw a 20% increase in category coverage in a head-to-head test with Plaid and another competitor.
Innovate for the future
To generate ongoing engagement with your users, you need to not only innovate but also have a partner who innovates. From day one, Plaid has been driven by a vision to revolutionize finance. We continue to invest heavily in machine learning and generative AI to deliver ever-more accurate and insightful data that powers the next generation of financial solutions.
The power of our network grows with each new connection and the billions of transactions we analyze, automatically improving data for you without any extra effort. And with each customer we power, the more we continue to learn and improve our solutions to better meet evolving needs.
Ready to build the future of personalized finance? Explore our demo and API documentation, or contact our sales team to get started.