What Is Plaid, and What Does It Do With Your Data?

Plaid is a US fintech company that sits between apps and your bank. When a budgeting, payment or investing app asks you to "Connect your bank", Plaid often runs that window: you sign in, your bank grants access, and Plaid passes your balances, transactions and account details to the app. Plaid keeps a copy too, which is why it's worth knowing what it collects and how to switch it off.

This guide answers "what is Plaid?" in plain terms: which apps use it, what data flows through it, and how to see and revoke your connections.

What is Plaid?

Plaid is a financial data aggregator: a company whose job is to connect apps to thousands of banks, so each app doesn't have to build those connections itself. It was founded in 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey and is based in San Francisco.

A few facts that explain why its name shows up so often:

Plaid isn't a bank, and it doesn't hold your money. Think of it as plumbing: invisible most of the time, and only noticed when you look at what's connected to what.

Which apps use Plaid?

Plaid says thousands of apps use it. They fall into a few groups:

• Payment and transfer apps, such as Venmo, to verify and link a bank account.
• Investing and crypto apps, such as Robinhood and Coinbase, to fund your account from your bank.
• Budgeting and personal finance apps, to import your transactions automatically.
• Lenders and landlords, to check income, balances or identity during an application.

Many apps use more than one aggregator (MX, Finicity and Yodlee are the other big names), and switch between them by bank. The easiest way to tell is the connection screen itself: Plaid's window carries the Plaid name, and a Plaid Portal account will list every app you've connected through it.

How a Plaid connection works

When you tap "Connect your bank", the flow usually goes like this:

1. The app opens Plaid's window, called Plaid Link.
2. You pick your bank from Plaid's list.
3. You sign in. With most large US banks you're sent to the bank's own sign-in page; with some smaller banks you type your credentials into Plaid's window instead.
4. The bank asks you to approve what's shared, typically accounts, balances and transactions.
5. Plaid receives access, fetches the data and passes it to the app.
6. Plaid keeps checking for new transactions until the connection is removed.

That last step is the one people forget. A connection doesn't end when you stop opening the app. It keeps running until you, the app or your bank cuts it off.

For a closer look at token-based links versus older credential-based ones, and which risks are realistic, see is it safe to link your bank to a budgeting app?

What data does Plaid collect?

Plaid's End User Privacy Policy (effective 8 December 2025) groups the data into three sources.

From your financial accounts:

• Account names, types, and account and routing numbers
• Balances, credit, loan and investment details
• Transaction history: merchants, amounts and dates
• Payroll or tax data, if you connect those accounts

The policy also says Plaid may collect data from all accounts reachable with the same login, not only the one you picked for the app.

From you:

• Identifiers such as your name, email, phone number and date of birth (and in some flows your Social Security number)
• Login credentials and one-time passcodes where the connection uses them
• Documents you upload, such as bank statements or pay stubs

From your device:

• IP address, time zone and approximate location
• Device model, operating system, browser and network details

Plaid can also receive data about you from the app developer and from identity and fraud-prevention services, and it may infer new information, such as your likely income.

What does Plaid do with your data?

According to its policy, Plaid uses this data to:

• run the service you asked for (passing your data to the app)
• prevent fraud and verify identity
• improve its products and develop new ones, including training AI systems
• produce insights and research, often from aggregated or de-identified data
• meet legal obligations

On sharing, the policy says: "We only share your personal financial data with third parties to power the services you requested." It doesn't use the word "sell". Data can still go to the app you connected, your bank, Plaid's service providers and affiliates, and a buyer if Plaid is ever acquired.

On retention, Plaid says it keeps data "only as long as it is needed", and that when an app removes your connection its systems are designed to delete your data, with exceptions, such as active connections to other apps, fraud prevention and legal requirements.

The 2022 settlement

In Cottle v. Plaid, users claimed Plaid collected more financial data than they realised and that its login window looked like their bank's. Plaid denied wrongdoing but agreed to pay $58 million, and a federal judge in California gave final approval in July 2022. The settlement also required business changes, including clearer disclosures and deleting certain transaction data.

The point isn't that Plaid is uniquely risky. It's that a data aggregator holds a detailed record of your spending, and the terms you accept in a two-second pop-up decide what happens to it.

How to see and revoke your Plaid connections

You can check every Plaid connection in about five minutes:

1. Go to my.plaid.com and sign in with the phone number you used when connecting apps.
2. Open the Overview tab to see the apps you've connected and the data types each one receives.
3. Select an app you no longer use, scroll to Manage connections and choose Disconnect app.
4. To remove what Plaid itself holds, use the delete option in the portal, or Plaid's privacy request form if the portal doesn't list the connection.
5. Open the app you disconnected and delete your account there too. Disconnecting stops future sharing, but the app keeps the data it already collected.
6. Check your bank's "connected apps" or "third-party access" page and remove anything left over.

Plaid's help centre notes that some newer connections can't be managed in the portal, and that it may keep some information after deletion where the law allows or requires it. Our upcoming guide to revoking old apps' access to your bank and Google walks through step 6 for the major banks.

Budgeting without an aggregator

Plaid is the price of automatic imports. If you'd rather your transaction history didn't pass through a third party at all, you can skip linking and log spending yourself. At the till, that's a few seconds, and it catches cash that bank feeds miss.

Our guide on how to track expenses without linking your bank compares five ways to do it, from a notebook to voice entry.

Voice Sheet takes that route on purpose. There's no bank linking or aggregator: entries are saved on your phone and as rows in your own Google Sheet, and there's no Voice Sheet server database of your entries. The security page spells out the one thing that does leave your phone: the text of an entry and your column names, which go to Google Gemini so it can fill in the right columns. If you'd rather talk than type, voice entry turns "lunch, twelve dollars, food" into a row.

The short version

So, what is Plaid in practice? A useful service with a long memory.

• Plaid is the company behind many "Connect your bank" buttons.
• It passes your balances and transactions to apps, and keeps its own copy under its privacy policy.
• Connections keep running until someone removes them.
• Plaid Portal at my.plaid.com shows what's connected and lets you disconnect it and delete your data.
• If you don't want an aggregator involved, manual or voice logging into a spreadsheet works without one.