Software Engineer - Backend

Plaid unveils new AI models to improve lending decisions and reduce payment risk. Plaid, the network that powers digital finance, today unveiled new AI models that help financial firms make better lending decisions, catch more fraud, and reduce payment risk, as part of its annual Fall Product Release. Plaid launched Instant Link, which lets consumers share financial insights with lenders in seconds, alongside an expanded LendScore suite of credit risk models, including LendScore 2 and LendScore Arc, its first transformer-based credit risk score. Plaid also introduced a new AI foundation model for fraud detection, now powering Plaid Protect, and extended its sequential foundation model to payment risk through Signal and Guaranteed Payments. The foundation models benefit from the breadth of Plaid's network, which spans thousands of financial institutions and millions of consumers, providing exposure to a wide variety of financial formats, income levels, and economic behaviors needed to learn patterns that generalize across real financial lives. "Our credit, fraud, and payments models are unique because they bring deep financial context to every problem they're solving," said Will Robinson, CTO at Plaid. "They build on foundation models that already understand how financial behavior unfolds over time, across the Plaid Network, and that means better decisions, and better outcomes, for our customers and the millions of people who depend on those services to manage their own financial lives." Smarter lending with faster data sharing and more predictive models. Millions of US adults fall outside of the traditional credit lens, making them difficult to evaluate with traditional credit scores alone. Cash flow data shows how people earn, spend, and pay their bills, giving lenders a fuller picture of their ability to repay. Plaid is introducing three advances in cash flow underwriting: * Faster insights sharing with Instant Link: Added steps during a credit application can result in borrower drop off. With Instant Link, borrowers who connect their financial accounts to Plaid Consumer Reporting Agency can consent to share their cash flow insights for future credit applications, creating a faster experience. Lenders have access to those insights in under two seconds. * Sharper credit decisions with LendScore 2 (Ls2): Plaid's new core model is 42% stronger at predicting a borrower's ability to repay a loan compared to traditional credit data alone. New specialized models extend those gains for specific industries: Ls2 Auto lowered delinquency by 26% among deep-subprime applicants at the same approval rate. Ls2 Home Lending approved 6.3% more borrowers at the same level of risk, bringing cash flow underwriting into two markets that have historically relied almost entirely on traditional credit data. The LendScore family also includes a model purpose-built for short-term lending. * More advanced risk modeling with LendScore Arc: Powered by Plaid's sequential foundation model, Arc is a transformer-based credit risk model that learns from the order and timing of a borrower's transactions, making it Plaid's best-performing credit model yet, for lenders ready to leverage transformer-based credit modeling. In early testing, Open Banking Expo saw that Arc delivers significant predictive lift over its core model, including 20% lift on deep subprime and 24% lift on superprime borrowers. "Cash flow data tells a more complete story about a borrower. The challenge has been turning that story into insights that lenders can access and act on with speed and confidence," said Michelle Young, credit product lead at Plaid. "The next generation of LendScore and specialized models close that gap at scale, and with Arc, we're giving lenders new tools to expand access to more affordable credit." Extending the same intelligence to fraud and payments. The Fall Product Release brings these advances beyond credit, helping businesses detect fraud and make more confident payment decisions. Fraud often emerges from a sequence of seemingly routine actions. A new AI foundation model purpose-built for fraud now enhances Plaid's fraud detection solution, Protect. Trained on patterns and hundreds of millions of data points from the Plaid Network, it analyzes the full sequence of events rather than a snapshot to strengthen the Trust Index, Protect's existing scoring framework. In internal evaluations, it delivered up to 40% relative improvement over previous baselines. Plaid's sequential foundation model also powers Signal, Plaid's ACH payment risk model, which reads an account's transaction history in sequence to better predict payment risk. In testing, the sequential foundation model helped Signal prevent 26% more ACH returns without increasing false flags. Guaranteed Payments uses that sharper risk analysis to give businesses more flexible approval options, including delayed release and partial guarantees, rather than a single approve-or-decline decision. Plaid is an Event Partner of Open Banking Expo UK & Europe 2026 on 13-14 October at the Business Design Centre in London. Find out more here.

Plaid launches credit and fraud models fueled by cash flow data. By PYMNTS | October 6, 2026 Plaid is adding new artificial intelligence models to its network that powers digital finance, aiming to help financial firms with their decisions across credit, fraud and payments, the company said in a Tuesday (Oct. 6) press release emailed to PYMNTS. One new model, Instant Link, lets eligible consumers share their cash flow insights with lenders in seconds by connecting their financial accounts to Plaid Consumer Reporting Agency. This cash flow data gives lenders a fuller picture of the consumer's ability to repay, especially in cases where the consumer falls outside the traditional credit lens, according to the release. Another new model, LendScore 2 (Ls2), uses cash flow underwriting and predicts a borrower's ability to repay a loan with 42% greater strength than with traditional credit data alone, the release said. In addition, specialized models are now available for auto loans, home loans and short-term loans, per the release. A third new model introduced Tuesday, LendScore Arc, is a transformer-based credit risk model that learns from the order and timing of a borrower's transactions. This capability makes LendScore Arc "Plaid's best-performing credit model yet, for lenders ready to leverage transformer-based credit modeling," the company said in the release. Plaid Credit Product Lead Michelle Young said in the release that while cash flow data provides a more complete picture of a borrower, lenders haven't always been able to access these insights and act on them. Please add Money By Design to your preferred sources list so its news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks! "The next generation of LendScore and specialized models close that gap at scale, and with Arc, we're giving lenders new tools to expand access to more affordable credit," Young said. PYMNTS reported in June that lenders are shifting to a new model built around real-time behavior, because what a consumer earns and owes today matters more than what their credit score said six months ago. Plaid also announced Tuesday the availability of a new AI foundation model that is purpose-built for fraud and trained on patterns and data points from the Plaid Network. This model enhances Plaid's fraud detection solution, Protect, according to release. The company also said that its sequential foundation model now powers Plaid's ACH risk model, Protect, to better predict payment risk. The PYMNTS Intelligence and Plaid collaboration "Payment Protection: Why Firms Still Aren't Real-Time Ready" found that 94% of surveyed firms are not yet fully compliance-ready for new Nacha rules that require every bank and business using the ACH network to actively monitor for fraud. Plaid Chief Technology Officer Will Robinson said in the Tuesday press release that the company's credit, fraud and payments models bring deep financial context to the problems they solve. "They build on foundation models that already understand how financial behavior unfolds over time, across the Plaid Network, and that means better decisions, and better outcomes, for our customers and the millions of people who depend on those services to manage their own financial lives," Robinson said.