Cross-application Item creation

A Partner (the originating partner) can enable another Plaid Partner (the target partner) to obtain financial data, authorized by the account owner, without requiring explicit user authentication. For example, a financial institution (the originating partner) could use cross-application Item creation within their online banking flow to prompt a user if they would like to share data with rewards, budgeting, or tax accounting applications. The user would be prompted, using Plaid Link, to review and authorize the data sharing operation, but would not be required to authenticate themselves. Because the user would be prompted for this sharing from the institution's online banking platform, requiring the user to authenticate in Link would be redundant and create a confusing experience. Via these APIs, the originating partner uses a specialized Plaid Link flow to obtain user consent and create an item for that user with the target Partner. To be enabled for the cross-application Item creation flow with another Plaid Partner, contact your Plaid account manager.

1Within the originating Partner's application, the user requests enablement of another Plaid Partner's services.

2From their backend, the originating Partner calls /item/import with the authorization details for the user. (Note: the partner may already have an access_token from /item/import for other use cases such as User Account Management or Account Activity Notification. It is preferrable to reuse the pre-existing access_token in these cases, as access_tokens are long-lived).

3With the resulting access_token, the originating Partner calls/link/token/create from their backend, giving them a link_token.

4With the user authenticated inside their app, the originating Partner initializes Plaid Link with the link_token.

5The user is shown a brief consent pane. After consenting, a new Item is created for the target Plaid Partner.

6Plaid sends a webhook to the target Plaid Partner, notifying them of the new Item.