Plaid serves as a pivotal API for developers crafting financial service apps, enabling seamless connections to users' banking accounts. It empowers developers to effortlessly incorporate and retrieve both transactional and account information from a multitude of financial entities. Plaid delivers essential data including refined merchant identities, categories, physical addresses, geolocation details, transaction dates, and monetary amounts. Its offerings encompass Auth: a mechanism that facilitates ACH payments verification using knowledge typically memorized by users; and Connect: a feature that grants developers access to financial data authorized by users. Initiated by William Hockey and Zach Perret in 2012, Plaid operates out of San Francisco, California.