Introduction to Protect

Plaid Protect defends you from financial fraud. Using Plaid's exclusive data and unique position in the financial ecosystem, Protect can detect patterns that identify fraud long before a transaction fails or an identity check triggers an alert. Protect is designed to detect all forms of fraud, ranging from isolated bad actors using stolen credit cards to sophisticated, scaled operations using automation, synthetic identities and insider knowledge.

At its core, Protect is two parts:

The Trust Index: A fraud model built on rich, network-wide data. The Trust Index delivers a dynamic score throughout the user journey, helping you apply the right friction at the right time while improving conversion.

An investigative toolkit: Protect offers a best-in-class toolkit designed specifically for fraud teams, allowing you to go from learning about a fraud ring to deploying mitigating rules in seconds.

The Protect API provides programmatic access to the Trust Index, allows you to send your own user events, and enables you to receive webhooks for asynchronous user updates.

To get started with Protect, contact Sales to request access. Protect is currently available in the US only (financial account activity at institutions outside the US cannot be analyzed).

Once enabled for Plaid Protect, you will be able to explore your customer traffic via the Protect Dashboard. You can search and filter events, save those searches as rules, and use those saved rules to configure your workflows.

To access the Trust Index Score via API, update your existing integration as follows:

1. In /link/token/create, add protect_linked_bank to the products or required_if_supported_products array. The end user will complete the Link flow as normal.

2. After the Link session is finished, call /link/token/get with the Link token to retrieve the Trust Index Score computed for that Link session.

While Plaid Protect tracks events within the Plaid ecosystem, you can also send events from your own application and retrieve an instant Trust Index score by calling /protect/event/send.

To retrieve the latest Trust Index score for a user, call /protect/user/insights/get.

To be alerted when Plaid Protect detects a user event (for example, name or account information on a user's bank account has changed), listen for the PROTECT_USER_EVENT webhook.

If you would like a score from the event, you can then call /protect/event/get to retrieve full details along with the Trust Index score from that event.