Plaid is a platform that allows developers to build financial applications that can interact with bank accounts, execute payments, and manage risk. It serves as a link between banks and financial technologies, allowing users to easily authenticate and link their bank account to any application and utilize bank-like functionality out of that app. Plaid spans critical segments of financial services including setting up payments and validating financial data. It can help arrange and execute ACH payments, collect transaction data, validate user’s identity, examine employment and income data, assess the riskiness of users, and embed bank integrations directly inside borrower flows. Plaid offers benefits such as better ACH authentication, real-time balance checking, curtailment of bank fraud, clean and categorized transactions, and verification of borrower assets straight from the source.