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 three different product bundles, with two optional add-ons. Plaid Check products are available only to US entities and can be used only to evaluate US consumers.

Plaid Check includes a variety of different modules, broken into three use cases: Income, Home Lending, and Underwriting. In addition, two modules are available as add-ons for any of the three use-case bundles.

Income modules are designed for customers performing income or employment verification.

Provides 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.

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.

Underwriting modules are designed for customers performing non-mortgage underwriting, such as BNPL, personal lending, or second-look underwriting.

Provides 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.

Based on data from both Cash Flow Insights and Network Insights, the Plaid LendScore is a score from 1-99, indicating how likely a borrower is to default over the next 12 months, across a broad range of credit products; a higher score indicates greater likelihood of repayment. The LendScore is a single, market-ready score that lenders can use to better understand the creditworthiness of applicants by layering in ability to pay and behavioral insights. LendScore also returns the top five reasons the score is not higher, for use in adverse action notices.

Receive 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. With credit insights powered by the Plaid Network, lenders receive differentiated risk signals that are complementary to traditional credit and cash flow.

Receive aggregated transaction data across all permissioned accounts. This data can be used for credit decisioning and forms the basis of the Plaid LendScore. It also includes measures of volatility across income and expenditure categories, allowing lenders to better understand how an applicant is managing their finances.

Home Lending modules are designed for customers performing home lending underwriting.

Designed specifically for home lending, Home Lending Report provides an FCRA-compliant asset verification report approved for use with Fannie Mae Day 1 Certainty and Freddie Mac's Loan Product Advisor® (LPA®) Asset and Income Modeler (AIM). With Home Lending Report, lenders can validate asset balances, account ownership, and transaction behavior; submit reports to GSEs for rep and warrant relief; refresh reports for employment verification pre-close; and replace document uploads with a single Plaid Link session. Home Lending Report is currently in early availability; for more details, contact sales.

To create a Home Lending Report and (optionally) share it with a GSE, follow the Home Lending integration flow.

The following modules are available as add-ons for any of the above use cases.

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.

Subscribe a user to recurring Consumer Report generation. See how income and loan exposure change for a borrower over time to improve post-decision servicing. Servicing was formerly known as Cash Flow Updates. For details, see 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_id. You must include an identity object when calling /user/create. At minimum, the following fields must be provided and non-empty: name, date_of_birth, emails, phone_numbers, and addresses (with at least one email address, phone number, and address designated as primary). If you intend to share the report with a GSE (Government-Sponsored Enterprise) such as Fannie or Freddie, the full SSN is also required via the id_numbers field. Providing at least a partial SSN via id_numbers is also highly recommended for all use cases since it improves the accuracy of matching user records during compliance processes. The user creation step will only need to be done once per end user.
2. Call /link/token/create. In addition to the required parameters, you will need to provide the following:
   • For user_id, provide the user_id you created in the previous step.
   • For products, pass in cra_base_report, plus any additional Plaid Check products you wish to use (cra_income_insights, cra_cashflow_insights, cra_lend_score, cra_partner_insights, and/or cra_network_insights), along with any additional Plaid Inc. products you are using. Note that Plaid Check products can't be used in the same Link flow with Income or Assets.
   • 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, including the required days_requested field.
   • Include a consumer_report_permissible_purpose specifying your purpose for generating an insights report.
   • On mobile, specify the redirect_uri and/or android_package_name fields as necessary, per the relevant Link documentation for your platform.
   • If you already have an existing Item and need to add Plaid Check to the Item, provide the Item's access_token. Otherwise, omit the access_token field in your request.
   • If your use case involves a user linking Items at multiple institutions, set enable_multi_item_link to true to let them do so in one Link session; see Multi-Item Link.
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 USER_CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook.
5. Upon receiving the USER_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 USER_CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook will fire and you can repeat the step above.

Below is a variation on the standard flow with a focus on home lending-related use cases and sharing reports with a GSE.

1. Call /user/create to create a user_id. You must include an identity object when calling /user/create. The user creation step will only need to be done once per end user.
   • Make sure to include the user's full SSN, as it is required for GSE integrations.
2. Call /link/token/create. In addition to the required parameters, you will need to provide the following:
   • Set gse_options.report_types to contain VOA.
   • For user_id, provide the user_id you created in the previous step.
   • For products, pass in cra_base_report.
   • 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, including the required days_requested field.
   • Include a consumer_report_permissible_purpose specifying your purpose for generating an insights report.
   • On mobile, specify the redirect_uri and/or android_package_name fields as necessary, per the relevant Link documentation for your platform.
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 USER_CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook. (Legacy integrations created before December 10, 2025 receive CHECK_REPORT_READY instead.)
5. Upon receiving the USER_CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook, fetch a Home Lending Report using /cra/check_report/verification/get or a PDF copy using /cra/check_report/verification/pdf/get. This data must be fetched within 24 hours of report creation.
6. When GSE options are specified, the Home Lending Report response will contain a gse_reference_id, which is an OAuth token that can be used by the GSE partner you want to share report data with to access the report. You may also use the /oauth/token endpoint to create a sharing token. For more details, see Sharing Consumer Report data with partners.
7. Send the OAuth token to your GSE partner and continue through their flow.
8. (Optional) To refresh a Consumer Report with new data, call /cra/check_report/create to refresh the report. Upon refresh, a new USER_CHECK_REPORT_READY webhook will fire and you can repeat step 5 above.
   • After refreshing the report, to share the refreshed report with a GSE, you must create a new sharing token by repeating steps 6-7 above.

curl -X POST https://sandbox.plaid.com/link/token/create -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{
  "client_id": "${PLAID_CLIENT_ID}",
  "secret": "${PLAID_SECRET}",
  "user": {
    "client_user_id": "user-abc",
    "email_address": "user@example.com"
  },
  "user_id": "usr_9nSp2KuZ2x4JDw",
  "products": ["cra_base_report"],
  "consumer_report_permissible_purpose": "ACCOUNT_REVIEW_CREDIT",
  "cra_options": {
    "days_requested": 365,
    "base_report": {
      "gse_options": {
        "report_types": ["VOA"]
      }
    }
  },
  "client_name": "The Loan Arranger",
  "language": "en",
  "country_codes": ["US"],
  "webhook": "https://sample-web-hook.com"
}'

Servicing adds recurring report generation on top of the Standard integration flow, for a user who is already onboarded to Plaid Check. For a full walkthrough, see Servicing. Integrations built on the deprecated /cra/monitoring_insights/ endpoints should see Migrate from Cash Flow Updates.

Consumer Report data is available via a no-code integration through the Credit Dashboard. You can fill out a form with information about your end user, such as their name, email address, address, and phone number; and indicate your basis for processing this data and how much history you would like to collect. Plaid will then generate a hyperlink that can be used to launch a Plaid-hosted Link session. Plaid can email the link directly to your user (Production only, not available in Sandbox), or you can send it to them yourself.

After the end user successfully completes the Link session, their data will be available in the Dashboard for you to view, archive, or delete. The data shown will be the same data returned by a regular Consumer Report API call, in a user-friendly web-based session.

Once you are enabled for the Credit Dashboard, all new sessions going forward created via the Dashboard will be displayed in the Dashboard. Sessions created via the API will not be displayed in the Dashboard for new customers.

Credit Dashboard permissions

Credit Dashboard access is controlled by the following Dashboard permissions, which can be assigned from the Settings > Members page. For details on assigning permissions, see Managing team member permissions.

• Credit Dashboard All Permissions - Grants access to all Credit Dashboard features.
  • Credit Dashboard Access - Grants access to Credit Dashboard
  • Credit Dashboard Application Creation - Grants ability to create credit applications and hosted link URLs
  • Credit Dashboard User Profile Access - Grants access to Credit Dashboard user profiles
  • Credit Dashboard View PII - Allows viewing of PII on Credit Dashboard
  • Credit Dashboard Unrestricted User Profile Access - Grants ability to view all credit applications, regardless of the user who created them. By default, users can only view their own applications.
  • Credit Dashboard Download Report - Grants ability to download credit application report PDFs
  • Credit Dashboard Refresh - Grants ability to refresh credit application data

If you are using other Plaid Inc. products, note that the account_id returned in API responses from endpoints prefixed with /cra/ will not match the account_id returned in responses from non-CRA Plaid endpoints. You can map accounts between Plaid CRA endpoints and Plaid endpoints by matching other fields such as mask, account type and subtype, and institution_id. If all of these fields match, and the accounts are associated with the same user in your records, the accounts are very likely the same.

To share a report with a partner such as Experian, Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac, see Share reports with partners.

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.

For details on how to test specific scenarios, including multiple income streams, specific employer names, or Servicing report generation, see Add Consumer Report to your App: Testing in Sandbox.

For details, see Plaid Check fee model.

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

If you're migrating from another product, see the Assets migration guide, Income migration guide, or Transactions migration guide.

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