Is there a Plaid data field comparable to the Simple Description from Yodlee?

Question

I'm currently evaluating using Plaid or Yodlee for transaction aggregation (I'm using the Dev environments for both right now). I really prefer almost everything about Plaid, but I'm having trouble with transaction name/description. Yodlee has a data field called the "simple description":

From their docs: "The transaction description that appears at the FI site may not be self-explanatory, i.e., the source, purpose of the transaction may not be evident. Yodlee attempts to simplify and make the transaction meaningful to the consumer, and this simplified transaction description is provided in the simple description field."

I'm displaying the transaction name to my end-users and I'm looking for something more user friendly than the transaction name field which often returns strings like "Withdrawal Check Card MOE'S BROADWAY BAGE BOULDER CO Date 01/06/19 0 9006020339 0 5812 Card [XXXX]".

I'm sure I'm not the first plaid customer to have this need. How do Plaid reliant apps solve this problem?

Answer 1

Plaid doesn't offer a simple description field as far as I know, but they do clean up transaction names.

I've found that when a new pending transaction comes in, the name is messy like you mention (e.g. UBER *TRIP 5VVB2). But once the transaction is confirmed, Plaid normalizes it for common merchants (e.g. Uber). I don't know why Plaid doesn't offer this normalization for pending transactions, but I have brought it up with them before. Perhaps this is something that could change in the future?

A solution, albeit complicated, is to build a custom model that normalizes transaction names. That's what we are doing at Pluto Money to supplement Plaid's transaction data.

Answer 2

I received a direct response by email from Plaid Support:

Thanks for reaching out to us here on Plaid Support, I'm sorry about our delay.

Our name​ field for each transaction represents our best effort to balance detailed transaction information while providing a clean and consistent API response. This behavior does vary across banks, both due to bank behavior and our own integration quality. Generally at larger banks our integrations do a better job at returning clean transaction name​s with appropriate transaction detail but for some of our smaller banks transaction name​s may be more "raw".

If you never want additional detail beyond the merchant/transaction name in your app I would encourage you to implement some filtering on Plaid's name​ field to make sure that no date- or account number-like character strings pass through into your user facing stream.