Why is Identity data required before creating a Consumer Report?

When building with Plaid’s Consumer Report endpoints, it’s crucial to collect identity data about your customer first — before you ever initiate the CRA report flow. When creating a user for Consumer Report, you must supply complete identity data in the identity object on /user/create.

Legacy integrations (created before December 10, 2025): these supply the same data through the consumer_report_user_identity object on /user/create instead. The required fields and the upstream requirement to collect identity before initiating CRA are identical.

CRA endpoints require customer information (e.g., name, address, date of birth) to create and process the consumer report.

Typical recommended flow

1. Onboard your user (“Sign Up” flow)

Ask for customer PII such as name, address, date of birth, and phone number.

2. Create or update the user record

Store all retrieved identity information as the official record for this user in your system.

3. Initiate CRA Requests

Once you have full customer information:

• Create the CRA user via /user/create.
• Make /cra/ endpoint calls as needed

What if you didn’t collect Identity up front?

If you didn’t capture the required fields during onboarding, you have two options:

1. Collect the missing fields directly from the user, such as through your own onboarding UI, before calling /user/create.
2. If you already use Plaid Identity Verification (IDV) elsewhere in your integration, its /identity_verification/get response can include the user’s date_of_birth and an extracted id_number, which you can use to populate the CRA user record instead.

Once you have full customer information gathered this way:

1. Create the CRA user via /user/create.
2. Ask the user to go through Plaid Link, initialized with the appropriate CRA products.
3. Generate the report once the user has successfully completed the Link flow.