Plaid Launches Guaranteed ACH Payments Solution

Plaid has introduced a tool designed to help customers make smarter ACH-payment-related decisions.

“ACH is the backbone of the digital economy and one of the most cost-effective ways to move money, growing 17% over the last five years,” Annie Gao, Plaid’s product marketing manager, wrote on the company’s blog Tuesday (May 19). “But running an ACH program comes with unique risks that brands need to manage.”

Some companies have built their own expertise in-house, Gao added, turning to Plaid’s ACH risk model Signal for greater insights, while other teams simply want answers.

The company’s Guaranteed Payments tool is designed for those teams, the blog post said. It is a “fully managed bank payments solution” that evaluates each transaction in real time and returns an approval almost instantly.

“If Plaid approves it, we guarantee settlement. If a payment fails, we cover the loss and handle recovery,” Gao wrote.

“That means you can fund your customer’s account instantly, credit repayments faster to allow further drawdowns, or deliver your product or service the moment a customer says yes. Your team never sees a return and your customers get a seamless payment experience.”

Guaranteed Payments is built on Signal, Plaid’s AI-powered ACH risk platform, and Protect, the company’s real-time fraud intelligence system. Companies using Plaid Guaranteed Payments are witnessing approval rates of up 90% on instant funding flows, with implementations in as short as two weeks, the post added.

In other Plaid news, PYMNTS wrote Monday (May 18) about the implications of OpenAI’s launch of personal finance capabilities within ChatGPT that allow users “to connect financial accounts and receive responses grounded in transaction activity and account information,” linking the accounts through Plaid.

That followed April’s announcement that artificial intelligence (AI) firm Perplexity had expanded its partnership with Plaid to allow users to connect checking accounts, credit cards and loans to its platform for spending analysis and financial management.

“These developments move conversational AI closer to the territory traditionally associated with financial data aggregators,” PYMNTS wrote. “The announcements spotlight the control of the interface where consumers increasingly ask financial questions.”

If consumers start asking ChatGPT or Perplexity questions like, “Why was my checking account balance lower this month?” or “Which subscriptions are costing me the most money?” those platforms become a starting point for financial analysis and decision-making.

That means that consumers might “spend less time inside bank applications or personal finance dashboards and more time inside conversational systems interpreting financial activity in real time,” PYMNTS added.