Platform Payments

Platform Payments (beta) is for reseller partners that resell Plaid services to end-customers. An example of this is a payment processor who is adding ACH to their offering. They create an SDK for the end-customer that can be integrated into their own application.

Benefits of Platform Payments include:

• Easy end-customer onboarding: Use Plaid's KYB and out-of-the-box onboarding UI.

• Efficient fund management: Choose whether to sit directly in the flow of funds or move funds directly to your customers. You'll be able to move your money more efficiently and safely, optimizing cash flow and reducing any unnecessary delays. By default, funds are safely isolated for each of your merchants.

• Instant payouts: Platform Payments provides access to both instant payments (via RTP and FedNow) and same-day ACH through a unified integration.

• Streamlined account reconciliation: Reconcile transfers within your customers' bank accounts, as well as with yours, and track funds at every step as they move through the payment flow.

• Simplified facilitator fees: Via Plaid's API-based solution for taking facilitator fees for your platform, you can collect fees without having to invoice your customers.

Platform Payments is built on top of Transfer. It's recommended you review the Transfer integration steps and use the Platform Payments documentation as a supplement.

At a high level, the instructions for integrating with Platform Payments are the same as for integrating with Transfer, with two exceptions:

• You will need to onboard your end-customers (your customers, also known as originators).
• When calling most endpoints in the Transfer API, you will specify an originator_client_id.

Other Transfer terminology

End-customers (also known as originators) are your customers, on whose behalf funds are being transferred. These are identified by an originator_client_id.

Users or (end-users) are the customers of your end-customers, the people who are paying in to Transfer. These accounts are identified by an access_token.

Platforms use Plaid for onboarding decisioning of their end-customers via an out-of-the-box KYB solution that includes a UI you can integrate into your onboarding flow. This seamlessly enables your end-customer to input their business information and agree to Plaid's terms and conditions for money movement.

After a customer submits their information, Plaid will review it and reach out directly to them for any additional details, if needed. You can check the status of this approval at any time. Once approved, the end-customer can start processing payments.

The steps below outline the flow for onboarding end customers:

1. Create an end customer: call /partner/customer/create with auth specified, followed by /partner/customer/enable.
2. Obtain an onboarding URL by calling /transfer/questionnaire/create. Send this onboarding URL to your customer to have them complete the onboarding questionnaire.
3. Obtain Plaid's onboarding decision by calling /transfer/originator/get.

Call /partner/customer/create, making sure to specify auth (not transfer) in the products array, and then call /partner/customer/enable.

You will use the end_customer.client_id of the customer as the value of the originator_client_id.

When you create an end-customer, you will obtain an originator_client_id. Be sure to persist this value in relation to the end-customer.

Even after your customer has been enabled, you will need to proceed through the KYB process before funds can be transferred on their behalf.

Send the end-customer's client ID to the /transfer/questionnaire/create endpoint. This will return a unique onboarding_url that you should use to onboard the end-customer.

1curl -X POST https://sandbox.plaid.com/transfer/questionnaire/create \
2 -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
3 -d '{
4   "client_id": "${PLAID_CLIENT_ID}",
5   "secret": "${PLAID_SECRET}",
6   "originator_client_id": "6a65dh3d1h0d1027121ak184",
7   "redirect_uri": "https://example.com"
8 }'

1{
2  "onboarding_url": "https://plaid.com/originator/hIFGXx1zM5pFerygu7lw",
3  "request_id": "saKrIBuEB9qJZno"
4}

Make sure to provide the URL only to the specific end-customer it is meant for. The URL is valid for 2 months but becomes invalid once the end-customer completes the flow.

Within the onboarding questionnaire, the end-customer will input their relevant business details, usage expectations, and bank account details, and then agree to Plaid's terms and conditions for money movement. After submitting the form, they are automatically redirected back to the provided redirect URI.

Plaid will review the end-customer's information and follow up with them directly if we require any additional details. You can check the status of the decision by calling /transfer/originator/get or /transfer/originator/list and looking at the originator.transfer_diligence_status.

Once the end-customer's status is approved and they have completed any implementation checklist items required, you can begin moving money for them.

Each Plaid Ledger is linked to a funding account, which is a regular business checking account. For your end-customers, the account details for the account they would like to use as a funding account are collected during onboarding and persisted against their originator_client_id. A Ledger will automatically be created for each of your end-customers.

Debits created by calling /transfer/authorization/create followed by the /transfer/create endpoint for your customer will increase their Ledger balance. Incoming funds that are not yet available (i.e. whose hold period has not yet elapsed) are in the pending portion of the balance. Once the hold period elapses, at 3pm EST on the final release date, these funds will shift to the available portion of the balance, where they are held until you pay them out.

To create this withdrawal from the Plaid Ledger balance, call /transfer/ledger/withdraw endpoint, specifying the originator_client_id, amount, and rail (e.g. ach, same-day-ach, rtp). This will create a sweep and move the funds from your customer's Ledger balance to their funding account at the next available window (or instantly if done via RTP).

Any return could result in a negative balance in the end-customer's Plaid Ledger if there are not funds in the balance to cover the return. As the Platform, you are liable for making end-customers' balances whole, and should have strategies in place to recover funds from them. For example, you should first try calling /transfer/ledger/deposit to bring the balance out of negative. Should these deposits fail, Plaid will reach out to you to make the balance whole.

In the future, Plaid will add configurations to automatically recoup funds from your end-customer to bring it out of a negative balance, or to use your Ledger balance in the event of a failure.

If the issue of end-customers maintaining negative balances is persistent or severe enough, this will impact your access to the Transfer product.

Funds must be available in your end-customer's Ledger balance in order to issue a payout. To issue the payout, create a deposit by calling /transfer/ledger/deposit and providing the originator_client_id, the amount, and rail (e.g. ach, same-day-ach, rtp). This will create a sweep and move funds from the end-customer's funding account to their Ledger balance at the next available window. These funds will land first into the pending balance, and will become available for use at 3PM EST 3 days after the sweep.settled event is emitted. For same-day ACH sweeps, this will be 3 business days (for example, a deposit issued at 9am EST on Monday is available at 3PM EST on Thursday).

The logic for when and how much to deposit into the end-customer's Plaid Ledger will be dependent on your use-case.

After funding your end-customer's Ledger, you can create credits for them by calling /transfer/authorization/create followed by /transfer/create, which will decrease their available Ledger balance and issue the payment in the next upcoming ACH window, or instantly for RTP/FedNow.

Any ACH returns or processing failures will return the funds back into the available balance.

If your application takes a per-transfer fee for every incoming payment, you are able to specify and track that using the facilitator fee feature. When calling /transfer/create with type=debit, specify the facilitator_fee parameter. The amount specified in the facilitator_fee will be allocated towards the Platform's Ledger balance instead of the end-customer's.

For example, if you specify a $2 facilitator fee on a $10 ACH debit, then $8 will be placed in the end-customer's Ledger pending balance, and $2 will be placed in your Platform pending balance. Both will be converted to the available balance after the hold time expires. If the debit results in an ACH return, funds are clawed back from both balances.

Facilitator fees are available only on ACH debit transfers. Facilitator fees are not supported on end-customer deposits or withdrawals to or from a Ledger balance. To support a custom fee structure (such as taking a fixed monthly fee from your end-customer), you can use /transfer/ledger/distribute.

Platform customers can move money between their own Platform-level Ledger balance and the Ledger balance of any of their end-customers by using /transfer/ledger/distribute (beta).

Note that this endpoint is in an early development phase as Plaid gathers customer feedback. There are currently no events emitted within /transfer/event/sync for Ledger distributions, nor is there an API to fetch a specific distribution object. Instead, Ledger distributions are available in the CSV reconciliation reports in order to fully audit all movements of funds. If you are interested in using the /transfer/ledger/distribute endpoint, contact your Plaid Account Manager.