Payment products

Auth is a flexible solution for account and routing number verification that can be used with either a Plaid payments processor partner, or any other processor of your choice, for payments processing.

Transfer is an end-to-end payment processing solution that performs funds transfers.

Auth provides the most flexibility in terms of supported use cases and integration modes, while Transfer provides a single, end-to-end solution for funds transfers.

Plaid Signal is Plaid's solution for ACH risk management. With Signal, you can use Signal Rules in the Plaid Dashboard to create and manage business logic for handling transactions.

Plaid Signal includes two separate products: Balance, which gets real-time balances; and Signal Transaction Scores, which uses ML modeling to assess transaction risk using over 80 attributes. You can purchase and use either Balance or Signal Transaction Scores by itself, or combine them for a more comprehensive ACH risk management approach.

Balance gets real-time balances to reduce ACH risk. Using Signal Rules, you create your own business logic to indicate how to process transactions based on comparing real-time balance and transaction amount. Balance is frequently used with Auth and also automatically included as part of Transfer; you can customize the Balance checks used via the Dashboard.

For non-ACH risk assessment use cases (e.g. treasury management or personal finance management), Balance can also be used without Signal Rules.

Signal Transaction Scores uses ML modeling to predict the risk of ACH returns with the lowest latency and can be used with either Auth or Transfer. Using Signal Rules, you create your own business logic to indicate how to process transactions based on over 80 attributes. The Signal Dashboard also provides backtesting, rules analytics, and rules suggestions that optimize your revenue based on personalized business data, industry trends, and your desired risk profile.

Balance fetches an end user's real-time balance and is a simple and affordable solution for predicting insufficient funds ACH returns (over 75% of returns). It can also be used for non-ACH use cases, such as financial management apps that require displaying real-time balance information.

Signal Transaction Scores is a premium, higher-priced solution that provides greater accuracy and much lower latency in assessing return risk to reduce abandon rates during critical flows in the user funnel, such as checkout and account funding.

Signal Transaction Scores is recommended for higher-risk use cases, or for friction-sensitive user-present flows where avoiding user abandons during the risk check is critical.

Balance and Signal Transaction Scores both use Signal Rules and share a single integration path, using the /signal/evaluate endpoint. They are designed to be easily be used together in the same integration. Switching between the two can be done via no-code configuration the Signal Rules Dashboard, or by changing a single parameter in the /signal/evaluate call.

Identity compares account info you hold about your customers to bank account ownership details to reduce account takeover risk. It is commonly used with Auth and Transfer, especially in high risk use cases.

Identity Match is an optional add-on to Identity that provides greater ease of integration and data minimization. Customers using Identity Match can experience onboarding conversion improvements of 20% or more, without increasing fraud rates, when using Identity Match versus using their own matching algorithms.

Investments Move (US/CA only) is designed specifically for automating data entry and reducing user friction for brokerage-to-brokerage ACATS and ATON transfers, helping reduce abandon rates and failed transfers for new users moving their assets to your brokerage. Unlike other products on this page, it cannot be used to move money between bank accounts, only to move holdings from one brokerage to another.

Plaid's Payments suite enables your users to make real-time payments without manually entering their account number and sort code, or leaving your app.

Virtual Accounts enables wallet-based features for your payments. Virtual Accounts can be used alongside other Payments components to enhance its capabilities with returns, settlement status visibility, and payouts, and can also be used on its own to add payout capabilities to apps that accept bank transfers from other sources.