Plaid in merchant onboarding

How it works

During onboarding merchants, the merchant provides their bank information so that Rainforest knows where to send their deposits.

By default, the merchant can manually enter their routing and account number. You can optionally enable a Plaid-based bank verification flow, where the merchant can connect to their bank.

Benefits

The Plaid-based bank account verification flow makes onboarding faster and more reliable:

• Reduces data entry errors when a merchants enters their routing or account number
• Merchants are more likely to complete the process, because bank login credentials are generally known or saved over the account routing and account number
• Plaid enables Rainforest to quickly identify the owner of the account reducing the potential for documentation requests during onboarding

Note that even with Plaid enabled, manual entry of the bank account remains an option to support merchant's who prefer manual entry or for banks not currently supported by Plaid.

Enabling Plaid

Ensure your integration is compatible with Plaid:

• Your component sessions need to utilize authentication permission groups
• If you use a Content Security Policy (CSP), you will need to add several directives to allow Plaid to run on the page:

default-src https://cdn.plaid.com/
script-src https://cdn.plaid.com/
frame-src https://cdn.plaid.com/
connect-src https://production.plaid.com/

Once your integration is ready, contact Rainforest support to request that Plaid is enabled for your account.

User flow

• In production, merchants will select "Connect with bank login" to launch the Plaid workflow to select their bank where they log in directly or use OAuth credentials.
• In sandbox, Rainforest will connect to Plaid's sandbox, which offers a variety of fake banks with different flows. Here is an example: