Support for Instant Verification with Plaid

Yesterday we announced our partnership with Plaid, which enables our mutual customers to use Plaid to authenticate and collect bank account details without touching sensitive data like bank account numbers.

The first API integration we are launching is instant verification. We’ve written previously about a fictional peer-to-peer payments app called Paymo, and we will use them to illustrate how our API integration works. The Paymo product experience has three parts: user sign-up, sending a payment, and receiving a payment. As part of sign-up, the user needs to enter their bank account details.

Before our partnership, here is how Paymo would call the Plaid and Modern Treasury APIs:

Customers would have to extract the banking details themselves and send them on to Modern Treasury when creating a new counterparty:

With the new integration, here is the flow of API calls:

As documented in Plaid’s API docs, our customers can opt to receive a processor_token instead of the bank details. This processor token can then be passed to Modern Treasury when creating the counterparty. Modern Treasury will use the processor token to add the bank details from Plaid directly to the counterparty.

This means Paymo users can sign up without Paymo touching sensitive bank account details.

Once counterparties are created with the appropriate banking information, our customers can use our API or web application to initiate ACH, RTP, and wire payments. The bank accounts have already been instantly verified by Plaid, so our customers have a higher level of assurance that their payment will not fail.

To learn more about building with our Plaid integration, please refer to our guide here. If you’re interested in building products with both Modern Treasury and Plaid, send us a note.