Plaid is an API to power developers of financial services applications and help them connect with user bank accounts. It allows developers to integrate and get transactional and account data from various financial institutions. Plaid provides data such as cleaned merchant name, category, street address, geocode, date, and dollar value. Its products include Auth: a solution that authorizes ACH payments based on the information users know in their heads; and Connect: a solution that offers developers with access to user-permissioned financial data. Plaid was launched by William Hockey and Zach Perret in 2012 and is operated from San Francisco, California.