Link Recovery (beta)
Notify users impacted by institution downtime to return to your app and link their accounts
Overview
Link Recovery (beta) allows you to provide a superior user experience and improved conversion when users run into issues connecting with an institution. When a user attempts to connect an institution that is experiencing a temporary connectivity outage, Link Recovery lets the user opt in to receiving an email notification from Plaid letting them know when the issue has been resolved. The user can then launch Link directly from a link in the email notification and complete the process of connecting their account. Link Recovery is designed to be easy to implement and can be added to an existing Plaid integration with only a few lines of code.
Link Recovery is currently in beta. To request access, complete this short Google form.
Link Recovery is built on top of Hosted Link. Enablement for Link Recovery will also automatically enable you for Hosted Link, if you are not enabled already.
Integration steps
Calling /link/token/create
When calling /link/token/create
, specify the following, in addition to your normal parameters:
- A
webhook
URI, where you will receive theSESSION_FINISHED
webhook used to deliver thepublic_token
for Link Recovery sessions. - (Optional) A
hosted_link.completion_redirect_uri
, indicating the URI that the user should be redirected to after completing a Link Recovery session. This field is optional, but strongly recommended; you can use it to redirect the user to your app so they can see the impact of linking their account.
Listening for the SESSION_FINISHED webhook
Next, make sure to listen for the SESSION_FINISHED
webhook, which will fire when your end user completes their Link Recovery session.
1{2 "webhook_type": "LINK",3 "webhook_code": "SESSION_FINISHED",4 "status": "SUCCESS",5 "link_session_id": "356dbb28-7f98-44d1-8e6d-0cec580f3171",6 "link_token": "link-sandbox-af1a0311-da53-4636-b754-dd15cc058176",7 "public_tokens": [8 "public-sandbox-b0e2c4ee-a763-4df5-bfe9-46a46bce993d"9 ],10 "environment": "sandbox"11}
After retrieving the public token from the public_tokens
array, you can exchange it as normal.
Testing Link Recovery
Plaid will not send email notifications in the Sandbox environment, so the Link Recovery flow cannot be tested end-to-end in Sandbox. Instead, you can test the two parts of the flow separately.
To test that you are enabled for Link Recovery and that users can sign up to receive emails, log in to Link in Sandbox with the following credentials to simulate a temporary institution outage: username: user_good
password: error_INSTITUTION_DOWN
. (If you are not yet enabled for Link Recovery, you can also use the following credentials to see the Link Recovery experience in Sandbox: username: user_link_recovery
password: {}
.)
To test that the Link Recovery session works correctly, call /link/token/create
and manually go to the hosted_link_uri
present in the response. This will launch a Hosted Link session, where you can test going through the Link flow with the user_good
/ pass_good
credentials and triggering the SESSION_FINISHED
webhook.