Imprint helps companies like H-E-B, Booking.com, and Rakuten create more valuable customer relationships. The payment platform gives brands greater control over their loyalty credit cards, helping them deliver more relevant rewards and intuitive digital experiences—all under their own brand.

Scaling those programs also meant strengthening the systems behind them. As Imprint prepared to double its cardholder base, convert major portfolios, and expand into new product types, one area of payment risk stood out: bank account linking. Cardholders could either connect their account instantly through Plaid or manually enter account and routing numbers through an experience Imprint had built itself. The majority of payment fraud and abuse Imprint was seeing came through that manual path, which provided fewer risk signals and created additional operational complexity.

To encourage more cardholders to use stronger instant verification while improving how it assessed manually linked accounts, Imprint expanded its use of Plaid. “We wanted to improve verification quality and reduce losses, but we also wanted a better experience for our cardholders,” explained Michael Krzysko, Principal Product Manager for Risk at Imprint. “Plaid gave us a way to strengthen account verification without adding unnecessary friction.”

Stronger verification, one experience

Imprint had already seen that accounts connected through Plaid Instant Auth had a meaningfully different return profile from manually linked accounts. But its existing experience presented the two options separately, and Imprint suspected many customers were defaulting to manual entry even when they could have connected instantly.

With Plaid Embedded Link UI Tabs, Imprint brought both options into a single Plaid experience, allowing cardholders to choose how they wanted to connect within the same flow. That simpler experience shifted behavior without taking away the manual option.

Before the update, roughly 37% of users went through Instant Auth. Afterward, that figure rose to 66%, a shift Imprint attributes to the improved UX. Just as importantly, the change came without any measurable impact on conversion: Imprint’s 90-day bank account link rate held steady across pre- and post-launch cohorts.

“We were able to move significantly more cardholders into our strongest verification path without forcing them there or losing them in the funnel,” noted Krzysko. “With Plaid, we strengthened how we manage risk while keeping the bank-linking experience seamless.”

Catching bad accounts earlier

Moving more customers to Instant Auth improved one side of Imprint’s account-linking strategy. Plaid Database Auth strengthened the other.

For customers who still enter their account and routing numbers manually, Database Auth assesses those credentials against Plaid’s database of known accounts. That gives Imprint additional signals at the point of linking, including the ability to identify risk associated with invalid or structurally broken account information before a payment is initiated.

That timing matters. Previously, an account problem might not become apparent until after a payment was returned. In some cases, additional card spend could occur between the original payment and the return.

“The cost of a bad account isn’t just the returned payment—it’s all the spend that can happen between the payment and the return,” continued Krzysko. “With Plaid Database Auth, we can help to identify that risk earlier, when the account is first linked, instead of waiting for a return to tell us something went wrong.”

Reducing return risk

That earlier visibility is translating into measurable results. Since migrating its manual account-linking path to Database Auth, the return rate on manually linked accounts has fallen by roughly one-third.

The largest improvement came from administrative returns associated with closed, nonexistent, or invalid accounts. Under Imprint’s previous implementation, those issues represented 73% of all return dollars from manually linked accounts. With Database Auth, that share dropped to 32%.

The results reinforced something Imprint was already seeing in its own data: payment abuse losses tend to be concentrated among a relatively small number of accounts, which can generate outsized losses through repeated failed payments. Plaid’s analysis added another dimension by helping surface risk signals on accounts that Imprint had already cleared—and that had not yet generated a return.

Scaling with more precise risk decisions

With Plaid providing stronger signals at link time, Imprint is exploring when additional verification is warranted and when an account can safely proceed, particularly for customers who may have less history within Plaid’s network.