Stripe and Plaid: ACH payments via Plaid Link

Stripe and Plaid have a partnership that makes accepting ACH payments relatively straightforward: the customer links a bank account through Plaid, and you use that connection on the Stripe side.

Step 1 — Plaid Link on the client

On the client you open the Plaid Link widget. It needs a public_key (or the modern Link token flow, depending on the Plaid API version) to start.

After the customer authenticates and picks an account, you receive two values:

public_token    # For further calls to Plaid.
account_id      # The bank account the user selected.

All server-side requests to the Plaid API use client_id and secret.

Step 2 — Exchange the public token

A public_token from Link can be obtained by any client, so it must be exchanged for an access_token on the server (using client_id and secret). Only the access_token should be used for further Plaid API calls.