Introduction to Consumer Report

Evaluate a consumer’s income, assets, employment, and financial stability in seconds based on insights and attributes derived from cash flow data. Get comprehensive, up-to-date bank account data to grow qualified borrowers, manage risk, and make credit and verification decisions with confidence - all through a single, high-converting UX.

To see a full financial picture, Consumer Report, offered through Plaid Check (Plaid's CRA subsidiary), provides the following:

Base Report for comprehensive bank account and cash flow data: See up to 24 months of consumer-permissioned bank account data (including account holder identity) along with categorized inflows and outflows. Get account-based attributes like balance averages and trends, as well as indicators of whether this is the borrower’s primary account based on transaction frequency.

Income Insights module for verification: Get details on over a dozen categorized income streams along with ready-made, model-driven attributes like historical gross and net income to streamline debt-to-income calculations and income verification. Assess financial stability with insights like forecasted income, employer name, income frequency, and predicted next payment date.

Partner Insights module for scores and attributes: Get off-the-shelf cash flow risk scores based on de-identified deposit account data. Offered through Prism Data, these scores and attributes assess a consumer’s credit default risk and are available through a single integration and API call.

Network Insights (beta) module for connection history: With credit insights powered by the Plaid Network, customers get differentiated risk signals that are complementary to traditional credit and cash flow. Network Insights provides insights based on a user's connection history, including for services that aren't consistently reported to traditional credit bureaus, such as rent, buy-now-pay-later, cash advances, and earned wage access applications.

Cash Flow Updates (beta) module: Receive regular updates about changes to cash flow. See how income and loan exposure have changed for a borrower over time to improve post-decision servicing.

Below is a high-level integration overview. For detailed step-by-step instructions with sample code, see Implementation.

1. Call /user/create to create a user_token. You must include a consumer_report_user_identity object when calling /user/create. The user creation step will only need to be done once per end user.
   • If you are already using the Plaid Income product, you can update Income-compatible user tokens to be compatible with Consumer Reports by calling /user/update and supplying the consumer_report_user_identity object.
2. Call /link/token/create. In addition to the required parameters, you will need to provide the following:
   • For user_token, provide the user_token you created in the previous step.
   • For products, pass in the Plaid Check products you wish to use (cra_base_report, cra_income_insights, cra_partner_insights, and/or cra_network_insights).
   • Provide a webhook URL with an endpoint where you can receive webhooks from Plaid Check. Plaid Check will contact this endpoint when your reports are ready.
   • Include the appropriate options for the products you are using in the cra_options object.
   • Include a consumer_report_permissible_purpose specifying your purpose for generating an insights report. If you do not include this field, the report will not be generated immediately, and you will instead need to call /cra/check_report/create in order to trigger report creation.
3. On the client side, create an instance of Link using the link_token returned by /link/token/create; for more details, see the Link documentation.
4. Launch Link with the Link token and send the user through the Link flow. Once they have completed the flow and the report is ready, you will receive a CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook.
5. Upon receiving the CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook, fetch the report data using an endpoint such as /cra/check_report/base_report/get, /cra/check_report/income_insights/get, /cra/check_report/partner_insights/get, /cra/check_report/network_insights/get, or /cra/check_report/pdf/get. This data must be fetched within 24 hours of report creation.
6. (Optional) To refresh a Consumer Report with new data, call /cra/check_report/create to refresh the report. Upon refresh, a new CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook will fire and you can repeat the step above.

To receive Cash Flow Updates (beta) on a Plaid Check-enabled user, follow the steps above, then perform the following additional steps:

1. Call /cra/monitoring_insights/subscribe, passing in the user_token.
2. Listen for the CRA_MONITORING: INSIGHTS_UPDATED webhook, which will be sent every 14 days for the user_token.
3. Call /cra/monitoring_insights/get to retrieve the updated insights.
4. (Optional) To stop receiving INSIGHTS_UPDATED webhooks for a user, call /cra/monitoring_insights/unsubscribe.

Access to Consumer Report in Sandbox is not granted by default. To request access, contact Sales or, for existing Plaid customers, contact your account manager or submit a product access request. Customers with Production access to Consumer Report will also automatically be granted Sandbox access.

To test Consumer Reports in the Sandbox environment, use the Sandbox credit testing credentials for more realistic and valid data.

To get started building with Plaid Check, see Add Consumer Report to your App.

If you're migrating from Assets, see the Assets migration guide.

If you're ready to launch to Production, see the Launch Center.