At Unit, our mission is to make it easy for tech companies to build financial features into their products: accounts, cards, payments and lending. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Plaid, a data network powering the digital financial ecosystem, to make building on Unit even easier.

For our clients, one of Unit’s most important capabilities is moving funds seamlessly between end-customer accounts on the Unit platform and external bank accounts (e.g. an account on Chase).

Our new Plaid Integration turns this into a matter of 1-2 lines of code. Moreover, it helps us automatically support compliance, fraud, and security best practices for our clients. The integration is instantly available to all of our clients, in both sandbox and production. Plaid’s website covers the partnership in detail and offers a Getting Started guide.

From a client’s point of view, the integration is simple: once you authenticate any external bank account with Plaid, you can pass the resulting Plaid token to Unit for the purpose of creating a payment or a counterparty. Unit processes the Plaid token, securely receives the full details of the external account (routing number, account number, balance & more) and completes the action.

This simple design helps clients implement a range of interactions with external accounts. The new Plaid Integration section in our docs describes four of them:

• Helping an end-customer fund their account (e.g. from Chase)
• Helping an end-customer withdraw funds from their account (e.g. into Wells Fargo)
• Helping an end-customer bill a third party (e.g. a client that banks with Bank of America)
• Helping an end-customer pay a third party (e.g. a vendor that banks with Bank of America)

The secure exchange of data between Unit + Plaid allows us to automatically support compliance, fraud, and security best practices for all of these use cases, in line with the settings in each client’s Unit org (for example, ACH limits).

Making financial features easy to build is a moving target. Plaid is a transformational force in the fintech ecosystem and an essential tool for thousands of companies building financial tools. We’re excited to partner and offer a powerful toolbox to the next generation of builders.

If you would like to understand how the Unit + Plaid integration can help you build faster, contact us to request sandbox access or book a demo.

‍