Plaid Integration: Making it easy for fintechs to move money between authenticated bank accounts

We’re excited to share that we’ve partnered with Plaid, the data network powering thousands of fintech apps and services, to make it easier and more secure for our fintech customers and their end users to send payments and move money to authenticated bank accounts.

Rather than handling account and routing numbers directly, our customers can now authenticate bank information using Plaid integration and pass a processor token to Treasury Prime that represents the account and routing numbers. Plaid acts as an additional check mechanism to verify the person trying to access the account is who they say they are, which filters out more fraudulent users.

By removing the need to store, handle, or save any sensitive information, this joint solution strengthens our existing KYC controls and improves fraud mitigation practices.

The benefits to Treasury Prime customers include:

• More security: avoid capturing sensitive financial information on your own systems
• Stronger KYC: adds an additional check mechanism to filter out fraudulent users
• Fewer errors: handles input validation, error handling, and multi-factor authentication‍
• Smoother UX: provides end-users with a mobile-friendly authentication experience

How does Plaid integration work?

We leverage Plaid Link to allow your end users to verify their external bank account (e.g. Wells Fargo) by logging into their bank and selecting the bank or credit union account they wish to use for bank transfers.

Once your user authenticates their bank account, you will receive a unique token from Plaid that can be used to create a Counterparty object within the Treasury Prime API. From there, all the relevant Counterparty fields will be automatically populated when the token is exchanged. 

If you need to send us any account and routing numbers, you can simply send us the token and we will automatically have visibility into what that token represents.

From the above example, you can see that the account and routing number are now replaced by a token generated on the Plaid side. This approach allows you to store and manage sensitive bank details in a safe and secure way.

Strong data protection is a fundamental part of the way we've built our platform. That's why all of our APIs that require knowledge of a person's financial information (for example, their bank account number), require you to pass a unique Counterparty ID, instead of the raw information.

Anytime you need to store your customers' financial information, you only have to create a Counterparty and store the unique ID. This can both simplify your application and keep your customers' financial information more secure.

How to get started

To get started, verify that your Plaid account is enabled for the Treasury Prime integration by visiting the Integrations section of your Plaid account dashboard. If the integration is off, simply click the 'Enable' button for Treasury Prime to enable the integration.

• Visit Plaid’s documentation for guidance on creating a link_token.
• Visit our documentation for guidance on creating a counterparty.

You will need accounts at both Treasury Prime and Plaid in order to use this integration.

• Contact us to sign up for a Treasury Prime account if you don't already have one.
• If you don't already have a Plaid account, you can create one here.

Want to learn more about how to go-to-market quickly with your fintech product? Watch this webinar or experiment with our Developer Sandbox. Interested in working with Treasury Prime? Contact us here.