John Pitts is policy lead for Plaid and has been critical of the Paycheck Protection Program; beyond the challenges of...
One of the main challenges with the emergency loan process is access to payroll data; small businesses across the country...
Fintech companies continue to attract interest from traditional financial institutions and now we have a significant acquisition to start off...
Plaid is becoming the glue that connects so much in financial services. Here is a rundown of just some of their recent developments.
I dig deeply into the $5.3 billion acquisition of data aggregator Plaid by $500 billion payments network Visa. We examine why this deal is worth 25-50x revenue, while Yodlee's sale to Envestnet was priced much lower. We also look at how Plaid could be an existential threat to Visa, and why paying 1% of marketcap to protect 200 million accounts may be a good bet. Broader implications for product manufacturers across payments, investments, and banking also emerge -- the middle is getting carved out, and infrastructure providers like Visa or BlackRock are moving closer to the consumer.
The economy has faced waves of challenges and fintech may be feeling the strain. Plaid investigated customer behaviour within the sector.
The firm is calling it the Plaid Portal and not explicitly tying the launch with a privacy settlement the firm reached on Friday, but the timing is close enough to call.
Yesterday LendIt Fintech recently hosted a webinar called “How Increased Engagement Will Impact Fintechs and Digital Banks”; panelists included Colin...
The principle behind Mastercard’s CipherTrace acquisition, L1 growth, and IRS getting your bank data
Paying attention is the path to seeing and doing. Mastercard has bought CipherTrace to see blockchain-based finance, to launch new businesses, and to plug in more networks into its nexus. The crypto networks proliferate at every layer, creating more computation on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, and Solana. The US executive seeks to see more too, asking the banks for their records of financial transactions to enforce taxation compliance.
In this analysis, we want to update the discussion of card networks, money movement, and the potential existential threat — or perhaps evolution — to existing infrastructure. It continues the thread on articles like Is Plaid cheap at $5.3 billion for $500 billion Visa? and Marqeta's $300MM of revenue & Ethereum's $20B in ann. transaction fees highlight opportunity and industry structure, and Who are the customers of Embedded Finance, and what do they reveal about Stripe, Affirm, DriveWealth, and Green Dot?, and more generally in this research section. We map Plaid’s progress in building out a payments ecosystem, and highlight Affirm’s debit card product powered in a novel manner through open banking. The analysis visualizes a likely evolution of the space with the introduction of Web3, and highlights a couple of early symptoms.