Plaid

You need to connect your agent to real bank accounts and financial institutions so it can access transaction history, account balances, and verify user identity without manual document uploads.

You're building a lending, payroll, or gig-economy agent that needs to verify income, assess creditworthiness, or validate employment without asking users to upload documents.

You're building a personal finance or budgeting agent that needs to show users their net worth, spending patterns, and account balances across multiple banks in one dashboard.

Webhook URL invalidation on server restart

During development, if your server restarts, Plaid's webhook URLs become stale for previously created items. Webhooks will silently fail for old items, and you won't receive transaction updates or login-required notifications. For production, use a stable, publicly accessible domain. For local development, use ngrok or similar tunneling, but recreate test items after each restart.

Access token storage and encryption overhead

Plaid access tokens must be encrypted before storage (client-side encryption recommended, then server-side encryption in your database). This adds complexity to your backend. Tokens don't expire, but you must handle revocation if a user disconnects an account or changes their bank password.