# Open banking

URL: https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/open-banking/

> How to connect your bank to Clatri with Plaid in the US and Canada: automatic syncing, accounting classification, credit cost and what it does not do.

Open banking is the third way to record transactions in Clatri — after chat and [statements](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/statements/). You connect your bank once and transactions arrive automatically via webhook, without you having to download anything.

## What it is and why it matters

Historically, your bank info was locked inside your bank. If you wanted another application to read your transactions, the options were scraping (a program simulating you logging in to the portal) or entering credentials in third-party services — both insecure, brittle, and unauthorized.

Open banking changed that. Financial regulators in several countries require banks to expose **official APIs** that let authorized applications read your transactions and balances, always with your explicit consent. The premise: your financial data is yours, and you should be able to share it with the services you choose.

- **The UK** pioneered open banking regulation in 2018.
- **The European Union** followed with the **PSD2** directive, which obligates all European banks to expose account-access APIs.
- **The US and Canada** have mature ecosystems with providers like Plaid that connect thousands of banks.
- **Latin America** is at another stage — see below.

## How it works in Clatri (Plaid)

Clatri uses **Plaid** as its provider. Plaid is a certified intermediary that connects applications with banks. When you connect a bank:

1. Clatri opens Plaid's secure interface inside the app
2. You select your bank and enter your credentials **directly into Plaid** — Clatri never sees or stores your bank credentials
3. You select which accounts you want to connect
4. Plaid establishes the connection and starts delivering transactions and balances

From there, updates arrive via **webhooks**: when your bank reports new movements, Plaid notifies Clatri and the system syncs automatically. It's not continuous real-time, but you don't have to do anything manually either.

You manage your connections from the **Accounts** screen, in the **"+"** menu → *Bank connections*.

### What Plaid does NOT decide: your accounting

Along with each transaction, Plaid delivers its own label (`personal_finance_category`): *"FOOD_AND_DRINK"*, *"TRANSPORTATION"*, and so on. That label is **an external provider's taxonomy**, built for an average US consumer. It doesn't know your business, doesn't know whether that lunch was with a client, and has no slot for software, cloud or advertising: almost everything you pay a SaaS reaches Clatri as *"other general services"*.

That's why classification happens in two stages:

1. **At save time**, Clatri translates Plaid's label into an account of your [Chart of accounts](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/chart-of-accounts/) only when the category is unambiguous (transportation, travel, health, utilities, taxes, interest…). If the category is generic, the transaction goes into your **"Other expenses"** or **"Other income"** account, never into a made-up account.
2. **After each sync**, an AI model reviews only the transactions that ended up in those generic accounts and, with your real chart of accounts in front of it, moves them to a specific account when the merchant makes it clear: Google Cloud to *Cloud infrastructure*, Anthropic to *AI infrastructure*, Figma to *Software and subscriptions*, Apple Ads to *Marketing*. If it isn't sure, it leaves the transaction where it was. On the first connection, this pass runs **only once** when the history import finishes; after that, movement by movement.

What you decide is respected: a transaction you already classified by hand is never touched by the model again, and every automatic change is recorded in the transaction's classification history, so you can see what moved and correct it from the movement's screen or from the **[To assign](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/assign/)** tray.

### Per-transaction decisions

Every transaction that arrives via Plaid goes through the same engine as a statement:

- **Duplicate detection** — if you'd already recorded the expense manually or by previous statement, it reconciles with the existing one instead of creating a new one.
- **Contact and project association** — the system tries to infer the counterpart and the [Project](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/) based on the description and your [contact directory](https://docs.clatri.com/en/space/people/). Details are in [Statement processing](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/statements/#automatic-association-to-contacts-and-projects).
- **Movements that are neither expense nor income** — see below.

### Transfers and debt payments: you assign them first

When Plaid explicitly marks a row as a **transfer** or as an **outgoing loan payment**, Clatri records it —the money did move and your account balance did change— but gives it a **movement type** instead of an income-statement account. It never forces it into an expense line.

Those rows are **excluded** from accrual matching, from the semantic matcher and from automatic linking to recurring payments **until you assign them** in the **[To assign](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/assign/)** tray. The reason is simple: as long as we don't know which debt, which savings or which other account of yours that movement belongs to, any automatic pairing would be a guess — and a guess about money moving between your own pockets is the easiest way to count the same thing twice.

You confirm the destination; only then does the loop close.

### Token encrypted at rest

The access token Plaid generates for your connection is stored **encrypted on the server** with the same encryption scheme as your financial information. If at any point you revoke the connection from the app or from your bank's portal, the token stops working immediately and the system marks the connection as inactive.

## Availability and cost

Today the Plaid integration is enabled for banks in the **US and Canada**. As Clatri acquires more users, Plaid can grant us access to its banks in the **UK and Europe** — the infrastructure on their side already exists.

Each connected account costs **300 credits per month** — the detail is in [Pricing](https://docs.clatri.com/en/pricing/). If you pause the connection, charging stops until you reactivate it.

## Latin America

For Colombian and Latin American banks, automatic integration is one of the most important medium-term goals. The obstacle isn't technical — it's regulatory and infrastructural. There's no open banking provider today with regional coverage comparable to Plaid, and banks in the region aren't required to expose standardized APIs.

Brazil moved ahead with its own open-banking framework; Colombia published the open finance decree, but practical implementation — Colombian banks exposing functional APIs — is still in development. In most countries in the region there's no global provider in the Plaid style, and banks don't have a practical obligation to open their data.

When regulation advances and viable providers emerge — or Plaid expands coverage — Clatri will integrate them. Meanwhile, [bank statements](https://docs.clatri.com/en/finance/statements/) and chat logging cover that role.

## What open banking does NOT do

To avoid wrong expectations:

- **It doesn't move money for you** — Clatri reads your transactions but doesn't initiate transfers, payments, or investments. The connection is read-only.
- **It doesn't decide your accounting** — it brings the movements and the label the bank put on them, nothing more. Your rules pick the accounting account, and if there's no rule, you pick it.
- **It doesn't replace your bank's app** — you still need your app to make transfers, pay your card, or request products. Clatri is an aggregator and analyzer, not a transactional channel.
- **It's not real time** — webhooks arrive when the bank reports to Plaid (can be seconds or several hours after the actual transaction). It's much faster than waiting for the monthly statement, but it's not instant like checking your bank app directly.