Plaid's API is split into separate products you call individually: Auth returns verified account and routing numbers, Transactions returns transaction history, Identity verifies who holds the account, and Investments and Income cover those specific use cases. Plaid's Quickstart and sandbox get a working demo connected to simulated bank data fast. We build the part after that: the real data pipeline that takes what Plaid returns and gets it doing something specific inside your underwriting, accounting, or verification process.
Auth is the product most businesses reach for first: it returns an account and routing number after a user links their bank through Plaid Link, which is what you need before setting up an ACH debit instead of waiting days on a manual micro-deposit verification.
Transactions returns transaction history for a linked account, which is what feeds an underwriting model, a budgeting feature, or a reconciliation process that needs to see what actually moved through an account rather than just confirming it exists.
Investments and Income cover narrower cases, pulling investment holdings or verifying income from bank or payroll data, and are worth knowing about even though they come up far less often than Auth or Transactions in general Plaid integration work.
Plaid's Quickstart and sandbox let you build and test against simulated bank accounts and data before touching anything real, which is genuinely useful for getting a basic Link flow working in a day or two. Moving to production bank connections is a separate step with its own application and review process on Plaid's side.
The harder part is almost never the connection itself. It's shaping what Plaid hands back, raw transaction data, an account identifier, a verification result, into whatever your underwriting system, accounting software, or payment flow actually needs it formatted as, and handling the real-world mess of accounts that re-authenticate, data that's temporarily unavailable, or users who connect the wrong account the first time.
We build the flow that uses Plaid Auth to confirm an account and routing number, and that the name on the account matches, before you set up a debit, instead of finding out something was wrong days later when it bounces.
We build the pipeline that pulls transaction history through Plaid's Transactions product and feeds it into your underwriting, accounting, or reporting system in the format it needs, instead of a one-off script that breaks the first time Plaid's response changes.
Tell us what you're verifying or pulling, account details, income, transaction history, and we'll tell you what the real build looks like beyond the sandbox.
A working demo against simulated data and a production integration that handles real accounts reliably are two different projects. Tell us what you're building and what financial data it actually needs, and we'll build the part between Plaid's response and your system actually using it.
Let's talk →It's a set of separate products you call depending on what you need: Auth for account and routing numbers, Identity for identity verification, Transactions for transaction history, Investments for holdings, and Income for income verification. Most integrations only need one or two of these, not all of them.
Auth returns a verified account and routing number once a user links their bank through Plaid Link, which is what you need to set up an ACH debit with confidence it will actually clear, instead of waiting on a slower manual micro-deposit verification.
The sandbox and Quickstart let you build against simulated accounts first. Moving to production, connecting to real institutions, is a separate step that involves an application and review process with Plaid before you can go live.
Yes, through its Investments product, which returns holdings and investment transaction data for linked accounts. It's a narrower use case than Auth or Transactions and comes up less often in general integration work.
It's a working sample application and setup guide meant to get a basic Plaid Link flow running against sandbox data quickly, so you can see the whole connection and data-pull process end to end before building your own integration from scratch.