What a credit card audit can see in your statements — and what it can't
Before anyone connects a financial account to a website, they should ask what that site can actually see. Most services answer this in a privacy policy nobody reads. Here is the short version.
What data does a credit card audit actually read?
To work out what a purchase could have earned, we need four things about it: the date, the merchant description, the amount, and which card it went on. That is the whole input.
If you connect through Plaid, that is what we request — read-only. If you upload statements instead, it is what we extract from the file.
What it never sees: card numbers, passwords, your credit report
Your card number. Not the full number, at any point. We store the last four digits so you can tell two cards apart in a list, and nothing more.
Your login credentials. A Plaid connection is authorised on your bank's own screen. We never receive the password, and we cannot initiate a payment, move money, or change anything about the account.
Anything outside your card accounts. We do not request balances on investment or deposit accounts, income, employment history, or your credit report. There is no version of the audit that uses them, so there is no reason to ask.
Why the list is this short
It is not restraint. It is that the audit is arithmetic on transactions: for each purchase, what did it earn, and what could it have earned on a different card. Nothing else in your financial life changes that calculation, so nothing else is worth the risk of holding.
The same logic applies to uploaded files. A statement PDF is read to extract the transactions and then deleted — the numbers are kept, the document is not.
Is it safe to connect your cards through Plaid?
Plaid is the connection layer used by a large share of financial apps, and the mechanics are the part worth understanding: you authorise on your bank's screen, the app never receives your credentials, and you can review or revoke every connection from Plaid's own portal rather than having to ask us.
Worth knowing generally: Plaid can be asked for up to two years of transaction history, and different apps request different scopes. What matters is what a given app asks for, which is why the list above is specific rather than reassuring.
Plaid put this product through its own security review before granting production access in August 2026.
Can you disconnect it later?
Yes, and it takes one action. Disconnecting a card revokes access at Plaid rather than merely hiding it in our interface. You can also delete your account and its data outright. Neither requires emailing anyone.
You do not have to take the summary above on trust — what we hold and what we do with it is in the privacy policy, which is written to be read rather than to be defensible.