Visa Is Acquiring Plaid For $5.3 Billion (techcrunch.com) 19
Visa announced today that it is buying financial services API startup Plaid for $5.3 billion, roughly double the price of its last private valuation. TechCrunch reports: Plaid develops financial services APIs. It is akin to what Stripe does for payments, but instead of facilitating payments, it helps developers share banking and other financial information more easily. It's the kind of service that makes sense for a company like Visa. The startup bought Quovo two years ago to move beyond just banking, and into broader financial services and investments. The idea was to provide a more holistic platform for financial services providers. As the founders wrote in a blog post at the time of the acquisition, "Financial applications have historically used Plaid primarily to interact with checking and savings accounts. In acquiring Quovo, we are extending our capabilities to a wider class of assets." The deal is expected to close in the next three to six months, pending regulatory approval.
Plaid, Stripes ... (Score:2)
How about Polka dots?
Engage Ludicrous Speed (Score:5, Funny)
They've gone to Plaid!
Came here for this (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Came, saw, left satisfied.
I don't care if it's a Me Too post, parent comment says enough about the state of the market/economy/banks/etc to be both informative and interesting, even if the comment is obvious and what I came here to see. My kingdom for some mod points...
Hooray for fintech (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of VCs and startup people seem really excited by this news, like "yay, this fintech thing is panning out, the exits are going to be GREAT".
But while this seems like a great outcome for the fintechs and the VCs, it's actually the worst outcome for everyone else.
Finally, FINALLY we're seeing companies being able to take on the big banks with interesting and innovative financial products to chip away at their massive fortifications and the huge moats they've built around financial services. There's some actual, real competition, instead of the usual half-assed manoeuvring between a few big giants in the space.
But if the first thing that happens when one of them gets some serious traction is that they just get acquired by one of the big incumbents, we're just back where we started.
I'm sure it's hard to say no to billions of dollars, but I hope we see a couple of these companies stay independent.
Re: (Score:2)
Not that I disagree with your point, but Visa is not a bank, it's a financial services company that serves banks. That's why you have Visa cards with Chase, Capital One, Bank of America, Wels Fargo, Cit
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Yes good point, I said 'banks' when I should have said 'financial institutions'!
I just particularly hate banks :D
We should discourage billion dollar acquisitions (Score:2)
I think there should be a tax on market cap. It should probably be something like an additional 1% tax on profit for every billion dollars of market cap. Of course that would currently put Amazon/Apple in the negative so we would have to start somewhere much smaller like maybe an additional 0.01% (0.0001) tax on profit for every billion dollars of market cap to encourage companies to self break up and spin off instead of continuing to conglomerate. This would be an additional 10% tax on a trillion dollar
Ludicrous Speed (Score:1)
"They've gone to Plaid!"
Cards need to be regulated (Score:3)
Managing ledgers costs money (Score:5, Insightful)
The 3% paid to processors is far more efficient than what it would cost for companies to manage their own card processing and handle fraud complaints, etc.
Target is about the only company that runs their own card processing and passes an immediate 5% savings back to the consumer.
CostCo also negotiates a lower processing fee and passes the savings onto consumers.
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The big problem with cards is that
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Many times fees charged merchants is higher than 3%, especially for smaller transactions.
Also, think of it this way, 3% for a loan that averages less than a month is more than 40% a year to the credit card processor & issuer.
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But I don't understand what you're talking about as far as a loan goes. It's not a loan. It's a straight fee.
But what they also make money on is the float. Generally, merchants get their money in 2-4 days. That means that the credit card companies are making several days' worth of interest on every single transaction that happens.
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Sears used to run "their own" credit card (quotes because there has to be an actual bank involved). They got so good at it they created Sears Payment Systems to make cards for other retail stores and provide services for processing their payments. Eventually they created Discover Card, also. They sold both off, but I believe SPS still provides credit/debit cards for many store bra
So (Score:2)
Should I rush out and buy some shirts before the price goes up?