Demo utilizing the Plaid SDK https://plaid.com/docs/link/web/#installation

Maintainer(s): aditya@bond.tech

Introduction

This is a simple demo service showing how to run the Plaid SDK with a Bond backend. Particularly, the demo shows how a Brand might integrate with Plaid and Bond to link a Bank to a Card and unlock ACH capabilities.

Built on FastAPI. Run under unvicorn or gunicorn with a unvicorn worker.

Running Locally

To run locally, clone the repo and run

poetry install && poetry update
poetry run uvicorn app:app --port=8001 --reload

(Leave off --reload if you don't want code changes to spark server reloads.)

Link an external account:

Open a browser to

http://localhost:8001/plaid/<account_id>

where account_id is a valid Bond account ID.

Be sure to define your Bond API keys as environment variables:

IDENTITY
AUTHORIZATION

This process links a Bond account (account_id) to an external bank account (linked_account_id).

Use plaid in instead of a Bond account_id to directly hit plaid's endpoints instead.

http://localhost:8001/plaid/plaid

The following environment variables are needed if using plaid's sandbox directly (Please see https://plaid.com/docs/quickstart/ and https://dashboard.plaid.com/overview/sandbox):

PLAID_CLIENT_ID
PLAID_SECRET
PLAID_PRODUCTS
PLAID_COUNTRY_CODES
PLAID_ENV

Initiate manual microdeposit verification flow (same-day micro deposit flow):

To initiate the microdeposit flow, use a username and password other than user_good and pass_good during the account linking process. You'll be prompted to "Link with account numbers". Follow the steps in the plaid flow and enter the following values routing number: 110000000 | account number: 1111222233330000 when prompted.

Notice in the console that the account verification_status is set to pending_manual_verification.

Verify microdeposits:

Open a browser to

http://localhost:8001/plaid/<account_id>/<linked_account_id>

where account_id is a valid Bond account ID and linked_account_id is the linked external account_id which is obtained by the link account step (check console to get the linked_account_id).

In the sandbox environment, a confirming the values of $0.01 and $0.02 a the two microdeposits would successfully verify the microdeposit flow. Any other values for the microdeposits would fail to verify the linked external account.

Other information

Be sure to define your Bond API keys as environment variables:

IDENTITY
AUTHORIZATION

The API documentation:

http://localhost:8001/docs

Contact aditya@bond.tech for any questions.

Please refer to the docs (https://docs.bond.tech/docs/link-external-accounts) for more details. Also check the web browser console log for other details about the linking process.

Discussion

The basic approach here is to serve html content that calls back to the server to get a one-time token used by in-browser javascript. This demonstrates that you can secure your credentials in your server infrastructure, and use those to generate and supply the temporary keys within content served to card holders. Of course, your content delivery may not itself be delivered by your service layer, maybe by a CDN. This is just a convenient construct in this demo.