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?

As a last resort, if you do not have an onboarding step to pull this PII, you’ll need to:

1. Send them through Plaid Link with the identity product enabled.
2. Once Link completes, call /identity/get using their new access token.
3. Use that returned data to populate the user record, then create the CRA user via /user/create.
4. Ask the user to go through Plaid Link again, this time initialized with the appropriate CRA products.
5. Generate the report once the user has successfully completed the link flow.