Can Someone Please Help Describe How MD+/Plaid Work?
I am really unclear about how this all happens. Direct Connect is easy enough to understand. But MD+ remains a mystery despite my reading all the KB and Blog stuff. For example:
1. Do I have to get/pay for account at Plaid and MD+?
2. How is payment, especially periodic payment handled?
3. What forms of payment are options for this?
4. How to see in advance exactly which institutions are working with MD+/Plaid? It makes no sense to proceed if mine are not.
5. When downloading occurs via MD+, which servers are contacted and how? Some kind of a sequence diagram would be really helpful here.
6. IK is pretty good at stating what data THEY hold in this process. But what about Plaid?
7. Direct Connect worked pretty well in getting transaction types, securities involved, accounts, etc into the right places. What about MD+?
8. Any other questions I should be asking but am not yet smart enough to even ask?
I have been told that there is a free trial. And that is great. But I still want to know, IN ADVANCE, just what I am getting into here. I think it is a reasonable expectation before I start handing over my data and spending my time wrestling with these - not-insignificant - changes..
So thanks to all who might be able to clarify these murky waters for me. Best!
Keyboard shortcuts
Generic
| ? | Show this help |
|---|---|
| ESC | Blurs the current field |
Comment Form
| r | Focus the comment reply box |
|---|---|
| ^ + ↩ | Submit the comment |
You can use Command ⌘ instead of Control ^ on Mac
1 Posted by dwg on 07 Apr, 2026 10:16 PM
Here is my take on some of your questions.
1. You only have an account/subscription to MD+. TiK have an account with Plaid and they get charged for your access and downloads, this is what the subscription pays for, we have been told that the subscription is cost recovery only.
2. I'm not totally sure about what you are asking here initial I thought it is what you asked for in Q3. If you are asking does MD+ have a system to do online payments and periodic payments, it does not, it is a transaction download system only.
3. I assume you mean payment for MD+. You pay through a credit/debit card.
4. There is no here is a definitive list of who Plaid supports.
For the time being the only options are:
i. Create a free 14 day trial account at Plaid and use this to search for your institutions.
ii. Take advantage of the free trial period for Moneydance+
iii. Post your bank names to the forum and an existing user may have a look for you.
iv. The site https://www.openbankingtracker.com/api-aggregators/plaid/banks/1 may help it lists a lot of Institutions Plaid supports.
5. As far as I am aware traffic is routed via the MD+ server, TiK are the ones being charged. TiK may like to elaborate here, if perhaps it is only the initial connection that needs to go via TiK.
6. Plaid holds transaction data, no aggregator does downloads on demand, they typically have windows where they retrieve the data and then hold it ready for you to download, so it is a store and forward system.
7. It works somewhat similar to OFX data. Of course it is only as good as the data supplied. So good data works well, bad data, anything could happen. If you are going to have problems it is likely to be with Investment data seeing some institutions have novel ways of presenting it.
2 Posted by whitedavidp on 08 Apr, 2026 12:00 AM
Man-o-man. Thanks for taking the time to try and help me.
In 2. I was trying to figure out how to pay for the subscription. Maddy has since informed me that this is done using IK's payment processor of choice - Paddle.
In 3. I was trying to figure out what the payment processor accepts as a form of payment. Knowing now that the processor is Paddle, I can see that they accept PayPal - which is what I would want to use in an effort to avoid handing my CC info to anyone else.
In 4. Thanks for the openbankingtracker link. That is the sort of thing I was hoping to find. Wish it had a search function but I don't see it. It is at least a start - only 97 pages to look through :-) Sadly, it does not seem to sort the entries in any meaningful way I can see. Hmm. Perhaps I can find a way around this...
In 5 & 6. I was wondering about all this. The lack of downloads on demand seems a shortcoming. But if folks find that, say every morning, the data has be retrieved for the previous day, that might be adequate enough for me. I do, however, hate that it is a store and forward mechanism. It means we have to put much more faith and trust in Plaid to do the right thing and to do it all the time. Does anyone know what, other than store it for our own access, Plaid does with this data? Does anyone know for how long the data stays on Plaid servers (waiting to be hacked - it is when, not if in my experience - which is long and feels that way)? Does anyone know in what form/how Plaid gets the data from the institutions - for example, using a server-server connection of some kind, screen scraping, or what?
In 7. This answers my question in that it seems the data quality is not any worse than what I have been getting via Direct Connect (or Web Connect before that). And I agree that the investment houses do present awful strange data sometimes. Banks have a simpler model to present so I get that they can do a more predictable job of it.
All of this does raise the question of to whom am I giving login credentials? I thought I read that somehow Plaid gets a token that permits them access to my accounts. And I get that - that is how my non-outlook email tool gets access to my email account. But I do wonder if I have to give my credentials to Plaid in this process. At least with email, I am taken to a page on outlook.com to sign in and give permission (token). I hate having to do a trial with a real account just to see this process. But it may not be clearly documented/seen in any other way.
The idea to post here for names is a good one and I will do that should it prove needed after the other alternatives are exhausted.
Again a HUGE THANKS for the help here (and all of the other times too)!
3 Posted by whitedavidp on 08 Apr, 2026 12:11 AM
Ok, found this source too:
https://plaid.com/docs/institutions/
It has a search mechanism. It isn't that great but it is something. For example, I cannot confirm my Costco Citi Card is supported. But "citi card" shows 20-30 others so maybe...
So far, the only thing missing for me - no surprise - is Fidelity Investments. Thank goodness for the csv import addin someone was kind enough to submit!
And this page helps alot for my questions too: https://www.openbankingtracker.com/api-aggregators/plaid
Best to all!
4 Posted by whitedavidp on 08 Apr, 2026 12:20 AM
So with the above info, I am ready to at least start the trial. For grins, I entered Fidelity when I got to select Connect Accounts. Low and behold, Fidelity is found and shown. Then, when I actually try to click on the result they offer, it says "Connectivity Not Supported". Setting me up to knock me down :-(
5 Posted by dwg on 08 Apr, 2026 03:11 AM
As for login credentials it depends.
It comes down to what the institution provide. In countries that mandate Open Banking it is token based, that is not the U.S. If the institution supports FDX then it is Token based access. If they do not support that it could be OFX i.e. Direct Connect and requires your DC password and username. If they only provide downloads or nothing it would require your Internet username and password and then Plaid could do file downloads or indeed screen scraping.
6 Posted by whitedavidp on 08 Apr, 2026 09:57 PM
Thanks for all the help.
Let me ask one more thing...
I have my first Plaid connection to a credit union where I have a CD. In MD, this is in a Bank account, not Investment.
When I try to map this connection to its proper MD account, the list of accounts I am shown include ALL of my Investment accounts and NONE of my Bank accounts.
So I am stuck once again :-(
I do not know if there is something in the Plaid connection that tells MD to filter the list of shown accounts in some way or not.
Best and thanks!
7 Posted by dwg on 08 Apr, 2026 11:01 PM
In Direct Connect account types are locked to an account type flag in the download, With Plaid Moneydance is using the Plaid API, it may do the same however I cannot say for certain.
8 Posted by whitedavidp on 08 Apr, 2026 11:36 PM
Thanks. This is interesting. I never even thought about this with Direct Connect. Even when getting manual downloads from banks now (and in the past), I recall being given the choice of all of my accounts. But I could be incorrect.
So I am not sure what to do here. Must I somehow turn my Bank account into an Investment account just to please Plaid? If so, is there some quick way to do this via the Toolbox or something? Or must I manually create a new Investment account and try to migrate the transaction records to it?
Best
9 Posted by dtd on 09 Apr, 2026 12:13 AM
Plaid handles my bank accounts, credit card accounts and investment accounts, with time delay, for those accounts it covers. for fidelity i'm currently using mmd's extension, since fiddelity is a pain in the arse about sharing the data, even with me.
10 Posted by dwg on 09 Apr, 2026 01:08 AM
I've seen with some manual OFX downloads that they can be quite minimal in their contents, for example I do see some that do not include transaction IDs.
Toolbox should be able to convert a bank account to an investment account.
Take a backup before you start.
11 Posted by whitedavidp on 09 Apr, 2026 03:32 PM
So I went ahead and tried to use the Toolbox to change the single Credit Union account from a Bank to an Investment as it seems that somehow, for some reason, MD+ insists upon this.
After the change and restart of MD, I see the account has been moved and now shows as an Investment account. And when I go back to Setup MD+ this account now appears on the list of accounts available for mapping the Plaid connection. So I chose this mapping and then tried to download transaction for this.
There was a delay and then the attached dialog was shown.
I am getting nowhere slowly :-(
Best!