Connecting your bank

What Plaid is, what we can and cannot see, and what to do when it hangs up.

Connecting a bank is optional in Xfin. It is one of three ways in, and the other two never touch your bank. But it is the one that keeps itself up to date, so most people want it, and it is the step most likely to go sideways. This page covers who is involved and what to do when it does.

Who Plaid is

Plaid is the company that connects finance apps to banks. Rather than every app building and maintaining its own connection to thousands of institutions, Plaid maintains those connections and apps ask Plaid. If you have ever linked an account to another budgeting app, a payments app or a brokerage, you have almost certainly used Plaid already. Usually without it being named as clearly as this.

We want to be straight about one thing that most apps bury: Plaid is an independent controller of what it collects, not simply our plumbing. They have their own relationship with you and their own privacy policy. You can see every app you have connected through them, and cut any of those connections yourself, at my.plaid.com: including this one, without asking us. Our privacy policy spells the arrangement out.

Bank connections through Plaid are available in Canada and the United States. Elsewhere, the other two routes still work.

What we can and cannot see

Plaid opens its own screen on top of Xfin. You sign in there, not here. That distinction is the whole point of the arrangement:

• We never see your bank username or password. They are typed into Plaid's screen, not ours, and they are never passed to us.
• What comes back is an access token, which lives on our server and is never sent to your device.
• The access is read-only. The connection is provisioned for transactions only. There is no payment or transfer capability in it, which is a large part of why the assistant cannot move money either.
• Your transactions stay on your phone. They arrive from the bank, land on your device, and there is no table on our server a transaction could go in.

Why your bank hands you off to a browser

With most large banks you will not type your login into Plaid at all. Instead you get handed to your bank's own site or app, you approve access there, and the bank sends you back to Xfin. That is OAuth, and it is the more secure of the two flows. Your credentials never leave your bank's own property.

The return trip is the part that occasionally breaks. If your phone suspended Xfin while you were away approving, the connection can complete on the bank's side without completing on yours. The app names this rather than leaving you guessing: “Your bank’s secure login finished but the connection didn’t complete (the app may have been suspended). Tap Retry to reconnect.” Retrying picks it back up; it does not create a duplicate.

When it hangs up

My bank asks me to verify over and over

That is your bank's own security step, not something Xfin requests or is able to skip. Some banks challenge every single session. If it keeps failing, stop fighting it. Import a statement or add the account by hand. A manually added account behaves exactly like a connected one everywhere else in the app.

“Connection interrupted” or it returned and nothing happened

This is the OAuth return problem above. Tap Retry. If it happens twice, try again without switching away from the app while the bank screen is open. Backgrounding the app mid-flow is the usual cause.

“Couldn’t connect to your bank”

The app offers you the way out rather than a dead end: try again, add the account manually with Fin, or upload a statement. Nothing about the rest of the app depends on which one you pick.

It says the connection needs reconnecting

Connections expire. Changing your bank password, turning on new security, or just time passing will end one, and the bank wants you to sign in again. Go to Settings → Connected accounts and reconnect the institution. That reopens the same connection rather than making a second copy, so your history and categories stay put.

My transactions have not appeared

A first sync pulls a long history and can take a few minutes. Pull down to refresh on Cash Flow. If it is still empty after that, email us with the bank's name. That is usually an institution-specific issue and we would like to know about it.

My bank is not in the list

Plaid does not reach every institution, particularly smaller credit unions. Import a statement instead , PDF or CSV both work, and the transactions come in the same way.

The full page on using Xfin without a bank →

Doing it without a bank at all

Worth repeating, because people assume a budgeting app is useless without a connection. It is not:

• Tell Fin. “Scotia checking, $2,400” is the whole step.
• Import a statement. PDF or CSV; Fin reads the transactions out and builds the account.
• Add it with a form, if you would rather type than talk.

All three produce accounts that count toward your reserve identically. The only thing you give up is automatic updating.

Disconnecting

Two ways, and they do different things.

Inside Xfin. Settings → Connected accounts → disconnect. This stops syncing that bank. Your accounts and transactions stay in Xfin as manual accounts, so nothing you have categorised or planned is lost, and you can reconnect later.

At my.plaid.com: revokes the connection at Plaid's end, for any app. You do not need our permission or our involvement to do it.

Deleting your Xfin account revokes bank connections as part of the process. See support for that and for data export.

Related

How to use Xfin · Questions and answers · Security · Privacy policy · Support