This page summarizes how to build an app that uses Meld’s Bank Linking stack end to end — from creating a connection through ongoing management — and lists common use cases that Bank Linking data unlocks. Use it as a roadmap that points to the deep-dive pages for each step.
How to use the product
- Create a connection to your customer’s bank account(s).
- Test credentials and sandbox flows are described in the Bank Linking Sandbox Testing Guide.
- Inform the user that the connection is complete while you fetch the data in the background. See Informing the user of the status.
- Get connection data to pull the financial data you need.
- This includes balances, identifiers, owners, transactions, and investments.
- Configure and consume webhooks so you know when new financial data is available or a connection is broken.
- You can also create a processor token for a financial account.
- Manage connection status to keep connections organized and up to date.
- Refresh a connection to get the latest data.
- Repair a connection to start receiving updates again.
- Delete a connection as needed.
- Route between providers to optimize conversion.
- Each service provider has different coverage and details. Be sure to read through them before using a particular provider. See Plaid, Finicity, MX, Salt Edge, and Salt Edge Partners.
- Meld’s Bank Linking stack lets you route customers to specific providers based on predefined defaults, a provider waterfall using institution coverage and availability, or institution-specific decisioning. Routing rules are defined in the Meld dashboard.
- If you already have existing connections with a service provider, you can bring them over by importing connections.
Potential use cases
Common reasons to integrate Bank Linking:
- View users’ balances and investment holdings to give them financial advice.
- View users’ balances and transactions to assess loan qualification.
- View users’ owner information to verify their identity.
- View users’ identifier information (account number and routing number) to perform an ACH transaction. See Account Verification for more.
Building your own institution picker
The first step of bank linking is knowing which institution the user wants to connect to. Most customers launch Meld’s widget, which has an institution picker as the first screen. However, you can build your own picker, have the user select an institution, and pass that institutionId into the Meld /bank-linking/connect/start endpoint — this skips the institution picker screen in the Meld UI. To populate institutions along with their symbols in your own UI, fetch this data from the institutions endpoint.
Institution data rarely changes, so cache the response rather than calling the institutions endpoint live every time.
