Using Plaid Link with Connect and Auth

Question

I am using the Plaid Link javascript library but I am running into an issue. I want to be able to use both the Auth and Connect products but the Link modal only allows me to show either Auth or Connect but not both. The documentation says to use Auth and then upgrade my token to use Connect. Which is fine I can do that. However the Auth modal will not show any credit only institutions like AmEx. Since I want both to allow for Stripe integration and for pulling in all of a user's transactional data across all institutions, what's the best way to do this?

Currently I am considering showing the different modals in two different flows (add a bank account vs add a transaction history account) but that is not very good UX. Also the IDs assigned by Plaid will be different and have different access tokens so deduping is a nightmare.

Or writing a custom modal that will use the Auth product for institutions with bank accounts (Chase) and the Connect product for credit only institutions (AmEx) but that will likely be a lot of work.

Answer 1

You'll only be able to use the Plaid Link + Stripe ACH integration for institutions that support Auth. I'd recommend initializing Link with Auth as the product and then upgrading to Connect once you have exchanged the Link public token for a Plaid API access token.

To answer the UX question you brought up - you can actually bypass using Link's standard "institution select" view and instead display your own list (you can use the /institutions API endpoints to pull information about supported institutions) using Link's custom integration.

That way, you can show your users a single list of supported institutions. If you initialize Link twice (once with Auth and once with Connect) you can jump directly to the Auth-initialized Link or Connect-initialized Link depending on the user's institution.