Where Does the Plaid-Quovo Deal Leave Startups?

Fintech startup Plaid , a quiet unicorn doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the API space, announced its first major purchase this week. The San Francisco-based company will acquire its competitor Quovo , a wealth management startup that aggregates investment and brokerage data. Plaid’s co-founders, CEO Zach Perret and CTO William Hockey, said in a blog post that the two companies would create “a single platform that developers and large companies alike can use to build any financial application—from payments to lending to wealth management.” As they explained: “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. Our goal is to make money easier for everyone, and doing so requires that we consider consumers’ financial lives holistically.” Perret and Hockey said their goal for 2019 is “to fully enable a digitally-delivered financial system—one that gives consumers convenience and control across their financial assets.” They also made a point of touting some of Quovo’s high-profile customers across fintech and traditional finance, including Betterment , Wealthfront , SoFi , Vanguard and John Hancock . But what does Plaid's acquisition of a competitor mean for its customers? The co-Founder and CEO of a budgeting and financial services startup, and a current Plaid customer, told FinAi News the deal will allow Plaid to offer an expanded product set, but not for free. He said the deal would result in "unfortunately, probably, less competition," which could give Plaid more pricing power. He said throughout the four years he's been a Plaid customer, he's thought periodically about switching, citing some shortcomings in Plaid's abilities to see statement balances and certain billing information. Asked why he stays with Plaid, he replied he doesn't have the resources to switch and hasn't seen product offerings that are better enough to make the difficulty worth it. "We were expecting the data elsewhere to be better, but others were only marginally better," he said. "As a whole, Plaid still offers the best coverage." The Plaid-Quovo deal comes just weeks after a $250 million Series C investment in Plaid led by Mary Meeker, a general partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins. The latest round of funding brought the company’s valuation to about $2.7 billion, according to reports at the time by CNBC and TechCrunch . Also backed by the venture arms of Citigroup, American Express, Goldman Sachs and Google, Plaid essentially builds the infrastructure that allows consumers to access and use their bank account through third-party applications like Venmo , Robinhood , Coinbase or LendingClub . The company was one of FinAi News 's five fintech companies to watch in 2019 . Although terms of the deal were not disclosed, Forbes reported that a person familiar with the deal said Plaid paid “south of $200 million” for the startup. Russell Raath, president of Kotter Consulting, and formerly with Deloitte and Bank of America, told FinAi News Plaid has largely been in the connection space, but Quovo, in addition to connecting consumers to financial service companies, emphasizes making sense of the data they have access to. He said it makes sense Plaid and Quovo would be looking for ways to "monetize their connectivity." He also said the "broader, richer" insights the companies might be able to yield is how value can be created. "In much the same way that Mastercard Advisors sought to take the vast trove of data that they had access to, and monetized this for their issuers (truly one of the earliest forms of monetization of data insights in the fintech space), this deal seems to offer the promise of much of the same," Raath said. The Twitterverse seemed mostly impressed. Morgan Creek Digital Assets founder Anthony Pompliano said Wall Street is “under assault from technologists,” referring in part to Plaid’s nine lines of code worth billions. https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1082699755459874817 Adam Nash, VP of product for Dropbox and former CEO and president of Wealthfront, called the deal “smart consolidation.” https://twitter.com/adamnash/status/1082664305126830080

Where Does the Plaid-Quovo Deal Leave Startups?

Marcus by Goldman Sachs Wants People to Be Financially Fit…. and Then Buy Its Products

Prosper CEO David Kimball to Speak at BI Ignite

Related Posts

KeyBank implementing AI to improve speed, experience, efficiency

Customers Bank taps Palantir for AI-powered onboarding

Announcing FinAi Banking Summit

Prosper CEO David Kimball to Speak at BI Ignite

EMERGING FINTECH DIRECTORY

FinAi Podcast

SPONSORED

The Next Generation of Cyberthreats: Powered by AI

Build an Antifragile Strategy to Outperform the Market

How AI and Product Experts Turn Fuzzy Requirements Into Focused Dev-ready Roadmaps

Connect

Welcome Back!

Retrieve your password

Continue Reading with FinAi News Premium - Less than $2/Day

Where Does the Plaid-Quovo Deal Leave Startups?

Marcus by Goldman Sachs Wants People to Be Financially Fit…. and Then Buy Its Products

Prosper CEO David Kimball to Speak at BI Ignite

Related Posts

FinAi Podcast

Connect

Welcome Back!

Retrieve your password

Unlock This Article

Continue Reading with FinAi News Premium - Less than $2/Day