Visa has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Plaid, a network that makes it easy for people to securely connect their financial accounts to the apps they use to manage their financial lives. Visa will pay total purchase consideration of $5.3 billion to acquire Plaid.
Plaid’s products enable consumers to conveniently share their financial information with thousands of apps and services such as Acorns, Betterment, Chime, Transferwise and Venmo. Consumers rely on these apps and services to help plan their spending, increase their savings and monitor their investments.
According to Visa, connectivity between financial institutions and developers has become increasingly important to facilitate consumers’ ability to use fintech applications, with 75 percent of the world’s internet-enabled consumers using a fintech application to initiate money movement in 2019 compared to 18 percent in 2015.
San Francisco-based Plaid has been a leader in enabling this connectivity at scale. Today, one in four people with a U.S. bank account have used Plaid to connect to more than 2,600 fintech developers across more than 11,000 financial institutions.
“This acquisition is the natural evolution of Visa’s 60-year journey from safely and securely connecting buyers and sellers to connecting consumers with digital financial services,” said Al Kelly, CEO and chairman of Visa. “The combination of Visa and Plaid will put us at the epicenter of the fintech world, expanding our total addressable market and accelerating our long-term revenue growth trajectory.”