FinGoal
FinGoal Technical Briefing
Published June 14, 2022
Supported by Modern Treasury , IowaEDA and Brale
Overview
Jack Ryan of FinGoal demos the FinGoal Switch Kit — a wrapper around Plaid, MX Link Money, Yodlee, and other aggregators that normalizes the account and transaction shape so you can swap aggregators in minutes instead of months. The live demo starts with a Next.js app running a Plaid link against Wells Fargo, then swaps the token endpoint and frontend portal to MX Link Money — which authenticates via open banking directly in the Wells Fargo app. The migration philosophy is not a big-bang swap: FinGoal recommends leaving existing Plaid connections alone and re-linking users through the new aggregator only when a connection breaks, so net-new users and natural re-auths silently migrate without churn. The Switch Kit\'s payoff is that the success page digests the callback event string from Link Money and renders the new accounts and /transactions/get output alongside pre-existing Plaid data — same schema, same categories, same fields — with only three files changed across the entire app. The thesis: developers should not be locked into an aggregator by migration cost.
0:00 Introduction to FinGoal and the Switch Kit
Jack Ryan of FinGoal introduces the FinGoal aggregator Switch Kit — a wrapper that lets you rip out an existing Plaid integration and swap in a new aggregator (like MX Link Money) in minutes instead of months.
0:30 Why aggregator switches take months
Plaid, Yodlee, and MX all aggregate bank accounts and transactions, but their APIs and models are not interchangeable. A raw swap can put a fintech's roadmap at risk for months; the Switch Kit standardizes the data shape so only a thin wrapper changes.
1:00 Three windows — code, docs, browser
Jack opens the Next.js repo, the FinGoal Switch Kit quickstart guide, and a browser running a live Plaid link that pulls Wells Fargo accounts and transactions into a success page. The mission: swap Plaid for Link Money in one pass.
2:00 Step 1 — generate a user access token
Paste the Switch Kit access-token boilerplate into the existing index.js controller. Both Plaid and Link Money need an item ID and user ID at different stages, and the Switch Kit standardizes the token shape across both.
3:30 Step 2 — open the Link Money portal with a redirect
On the frontend, Jack removes the Plaid Link handler and replaces it with a call that opens the Link Money portal in a new tab, passing the JWT for authentication and a redirect URL pointing back to the success page.
5:30 Open banking login through the bank's own app
The Link Money portal authenticates Wells Fargo via open banking — redirecting the user straight into the Wells Fargo app for approval and 2FA, instead of asking for credentials in a third-party modal.
6:30 Supplementing, not ripping out, existing Plaid data
FinGoal's recommendation: don't force a big-bang migration. As existing Plaid connections break, re-link users through the new aggregator — net-new users and re-auths silently move to Link Money with no churn event.
7:30 Digest events and render accounts
On the success page, Jack adds a digestEvents method that parses the callback query string Link Money appends on exit — and the three Link Money accounts render alongside the pre-existing Plaid accounts with no template changes at all.
8:30 Transactions — same endpoint, same schema
Same trick for transactions: a 30-day bracket, a GET /transactions/get call to Link Money production, and the new transactions load in with Plaid-compatible shapes and categories. The only clue they loaded is a scrollbar shift.
11:00 Why the Switch Kit exists
FinGoal's thesis: the best data should win. Companies shouldn't be locked into a single aggregator by migration cost. The Switch Kit makes it cheap to pick the aggregator that fits each data need.
Presented by Jack Ryan — FinGoal · LinkedIn · website
Topics: Open Banking, Data Infrastructure
