Writing his weekly column in Forbes Ron Shevlin of Cornerstone Advisors talks about a few different points of view when...
The $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid has created excitement in the fintech community and some believe this is only the...
Fintech companies continue to attract interest from traditional financial institutions and now we have a significant acquisition to start off...
In the age of open banking, personal information is now being shared across many different institutions; the company powering this...
Plaid acquired competitor Quovo earlier this year and has just announced their first offering through the company, Investments; the new...
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.
Yesterday it was announced that Visa is planning to buy Plaid for $5.3 billion, double the valuation of Plaid’s 2018...
In the long take this week, I try out a contrarian point of view on personal finance chatbots. Trim, a savings chatbot, just withdrew support from Facebook Messenger. While lots of other chatbots are still invested in conversational banking, what could we take away from the counterfactual of chatbots failing to get B2C traction? What is the impact on the rest of the platform wars waged by Amazon, Google, and Tesla for connected homes, cars, and the Internet of Things?
I look at two mental models explaining why and how financial APIs have led to the creation of billions in enterprise value. The driving news is that Square Cash is competing with Robinhood in free trading, powered by trading API company DriveWealth. Last week, we saw that Chime, Robinhood, and Monzo were powered by payments API company Galileo. Should these enablers be worth the billion-dollar valuations of their clients? Are APIs inevitable technology progress? Or are we just seeing venture financing spilling desperately into a rebundling play to find profitability?
Last week Plaid announced the launch of Plaid Direct, their new tool that allows both banks and fintech platforms to...