On Monday Visa announced a $5.3bn acquisition of Fintech start up called Plaid. That is a lot of money!
Plaid is one of those background software businesses that allows applications to thrive. It specialises in financial services applications. Basically it allows these applications to pull information from bank accounts and other financial services so that Millennials (mostly) can track their spending, create budgets and save.
The firm now has more than 200 million accounts linked to its platform. Around 25% of people with US bank accounts have used Plaid without even knowing about it. $5.3bn was double the value of Plaid during a funding round in 2018.
Payments is a very disruptive area. Visa is buying companies like Plaid as an insurance against this disruption. It does help that Visa touches everything to do with payments so there are often good synergies with these business.
Here is a really cool articles about the founders who are now billionaires in their early 30s.