
Visa Buys Plaid - coloneltcb
https://www.wsj.com/articles/visa-nears-deal-to-buy-fintech-startup-plaid-11578948426
======
vichu
Looks like it's official: [https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-and-
visa/](https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-and-visa/)

------
nikolay
Plaid is terrible! Both Wells Fargo and Bank of America support API
integration, but Plaid chooses to screen-scrape and does not work if you have
2FA enabled. Also, you can't even manually enter your bank information. In
other words, even if you pay dearly to Plaid, you may block many users who use
some of the top banks in the States! There is a bunch of services I cannot use
because they rely solely on Plaid, and I'm not willing to disable 2FA! Maybe
being Visa, it will make the whole service more meaningful if Visa pushes
banks to integrate, because it's 2020, and giving your password for your bank
to a third party, when there are APIs and OAuth/OpenID protocols available for
banks.

~~~
JensRantil
I work for a popular european competitor of Plaid, Tink
([https://tink.com](https://tink.com)). We don't do screen scraping, but use
the banks' own APIs. These days we also ride on the european bank directive
"PSD2" which gives us the right to aggregate financial data from financial
providers such as banks. That means we aren't breaking an Terms of Services
with banks!

...and yes, we support 2FA. ;)

~~~
colourgarden
Note that a SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN is shown when trying to access tink.com
at the moment. Says the certificate is only valid for cloudfront.net.

Edit: the website itself also returns a 403.

~~~
JensRantil
Weird. Works for me now. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
mst
Lancaster, England, Windows 10, Firefox, working perfectly for me as well.

------
siliconc0w
Plaid's product is absolutely absurd. Yes, please train your users to type
their username and passwords into third party sites because they're given a
legitimate looking sign-in box. US Banking infrastructure is so hopelessly bad
that this is hack of a business is considered legitimate fin-tech.

My wallet was stolen and before I realized it was gone and could cancel my CCs
some dude made like six obviously fraudulent purchases. No Chip and Pin - zero
verification. US banking needs to be legislatively hard-reset.

~~~
craze3
Every time Plaid is mentioned on HN, people want to hate. My take is: don't
use it if you're scared ?

A few of my friends were talking about Plaid the other day, and I told them I
like the company/product, but "many people on HN hate it." They were perplexed
and when I explained it was because you guys were nervous about entering your
bank password into a third-party (yet reputable) company's interface (that's
encrypted), they wrote it off as "being paranoid." Can't say I disagree...

~~~
wolco
Saying the company interface is encrypted so it's safe shows how effective
this attack can be. One of the attacks would present you with a login box. You
thin this is plaid and it is encrypted so it's safe so you enter your
username/password. It turns out to be a different third party. Not to worry
the hacker interface is encrypted as well. Another attack surface opened up
involves data breaches at plaid where company employee dumps access to
everyone.

It is probably the one thing you can do today that will at some point cause
you lose money from your bank account.

It is not even paranoid. It's a bad idea to leave your bank access codes with
someone else.

The less people understand how things work the more likely they are to trust
it. This just opens up a new avenue for exploitation.

------
coachtrotz
Plaid is an incredible company and provides a valuable service to their tech
partners. That said, their data collection practices are scary. They allow any
developer using their software to swallow all of a users banking data - I
would love to know how they police bad actors.

(Source: [https://plaid.com/legal/#privacy-
statement](https://plaid.com/legal/#privacy-statement))

~~~
coachtrotz
Here is pertinent verbiage from the Plaid Privacy Statement.

Information we collect from your financial accounts. The information we
receive from the financial product and service providers that maintain your
financial accounts varies depending on the specific Plaid services developers
use to power their applications, as well as the information made available by
those providers. But, in general, we collect the following types of
identifiers, commercial information, and other personal information from your
financial product and service providers:

Account information, including financial institution name, account name,
account type, account ownership, branch number, IBAN, BIC, and account and
routing number;

Information about an account balance, including current and available balance;

Information about credit accounts, including due dates, balances owed, payment
amounts and dates, transaction history, credit limit, repayment status, and
interest rate;

Information about loan accounts, including due dates, repayment status,
balances, payment amounts and dates, interest rate, guarantor, loan type,
payment plan, and terms;

Information about investment accounts, including transaction information, type
of asset, identifying details about the asset, quantity, price, fees, and cost
basis;

Identifiers and information about the account owner(s), including name, email
address, phone number, date of birth, and address information;

Information about account transactions, including amount, date, payee, type,
quantity, price, location, involved securities, and a description of the
transaction; and

Professional information, including information about your employer, in
limited cases where you’ve connected your payroll accounts.

The data collected from your financial accounts includes information from all
your accounts (e.g., checking, savings, and credit card) accessible through a
single set of account credentials.

~~~
A4ET8a8uTh0
I never used Plaid, but it reads like information used in typical bank
application for credit. Why would anyone willingly share this much without get
something major in return?

Does Plaid bank the underbanked? I am not sure what their appeal is.

~~~
fulldecent2
Simple. Just imagine that everybody is incredibly stupid and wants to be
robbed and have their identity stolen. That's the target market.

------
iask
Slightly off topic, but worth highlighting. Privacy virtual card use Plaid
(well at least the last time I looked at it a few months back). The
integration was extremely questionable. They were faking the bank’s login
page. So when you enter your credentials, it wasn’t the actual banks page.

There was a github issue opened, and after several followed up complaints they
blocked further commenting and the removed then ticket.

Subject of the ticket [plaid/link] privacy/security concerns (#68)

~~~
dmitrygr
Collecting _actual_ banking credentials is how plaid works, quite literally.
One needs to be clinically insane to give your bank login creds to a third
party voluntarily!

I refuse to do business with any business that uses plaid and has no sane
alternative to get bank account numbers (deposit two small amounts, three days
later I tell you what they are)

First time i saw it, i assumed the website had been hacked. I was actually
_more_ horrified when I found out that this was working as intended and some
website wanted my bank _password_!

~~~
greenyoda
Indeed. Sharing your banking credentials with a third party almost certainly
violates the terms of service you agreed on with your bank. If the third party
has a security lapse and your bank account is drained, your bank might just
claim that you authorized that transaction with your credentials, so it's a
valid transaction and they won't shell out their own money to refund your
loss.

If in doubt, you should check your bank's terms of service for online banking.

------
brunoTbear
Will be interesting to see the terms for the acquisition and see if Mary
Meeker's last investment for KP was a winner or not!

I'm cautiously optimistic for a good outcome for the Plaid folks here: last
round was two years ago for $250M. Could they have been suffering $10M/month
losses and are running out of money? Could be.

No offense to Visa, but I don't think of them as the most innovative
organization or one that is a sign of a "good outcome" for a company getting
acquired. I can't think of a good exit to Visa, but I am open to being wrong
on that one.

Disclosures: worked at Stripe; dealt altogether more than I would have liked
with Visa. Have no knowledge of Plaid's particulars.

Edit: Visa and Mastercard were strategic investors in the C round. Curious
what the competitive dynamics were that led to Visa grabbing the acquisition
instead of MC. [https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/plaid-announces-
strategic-...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/plaid-announces-strategic-
investment-from-mastercard-and-visa/)

~~~
tempsy
> No offense to Visa, but I don't think of them as the most innovative
> organization

Visa is a $434B company. I guess "innovative" is subjective but their
valuation trajectory has looked like a high growth tech co over the past 5
years.

~~~
brunoTbear
That's fair. 3x valuation growth in the last 5 years is tech company level.
More or less the same trajectory as GOOG and FB.

It's not Stripe or Airbnb level growth, however.

~~~
sdnlafkjh34rw
That's just a function of their size. I guarantee you that Stripe and Airbnb's
growth rates will drop to these types of growth rates if they hit the 100B
valuation. The truth is when you are so large, the opportunities for growth
become smaller and smaller. It's much easier to grow at high percentages when
you are small. Buffet talks about this a lot with Berkshire; he has said he
could grow Berkshire at a much higher rate if the company was smaller. Now he
has to pass on amazing investment opportunities that are too small for him.

------
xml4eva
As a former Plaid employee with options that vested after I was shitcanned
last year, this is some pretty welcome news.

~~~
brianpgordon
I'm interviewing with them this week. Any advice/warnings I should know going
in?

~~~
jsh123
do you think it’s worth it?

imo it’s hard to shake how awkward it is when everyone around you is rich and
you’re being offered a regular salary that is now dictated by Visa HR

~~~
Waterluvian
Also isn't there a chance you'll just get canned soon? The interview pipeline
has existed separate from the acquisition efforts. Visa will have opinions on
where they want to go from here.

~~~
kemitche
I don't have data, just an anecdote.

I was hired by Sun. Just before my start date, Oracle announced they would be
buying Sun. I was worried, but it turns out acquisitions are pretty slow
processes. There was months of waiting for government approvals, then months
more before the culture really started feeling like "Oracle" instead of "Sun."

In short, there's a decent chance that anyone applying now could be on payroll
for months or years before Visa actually meaningfully changes anything about
Plaid's workflow.

------
fulldecent2
I support this big time.

Plaid is a complete joke -- "give us your bank passwords and we'll validate
your account". Banks are an even worse joke -- "20,000 logins today from one
IP address, nope that's not a scam".

Plaid customers are the worst. Like Transferwise, you cannot setup a business
account with them without giving Plaid your business banking passwords. What
company treasurer would allow that?

Now that Visa is holding the bag this fixes two problems:

1\. For customers, there is less risk that Visa will steal all your money than
some "fintech" startup 2\. For Plaid customers, they may realize Visa is
buying this for the data and they may think of Visa as a competitor and not
want to support them.

\---

Because "just give us your sudo password to install software" and "just give
us your bank password" to send money is a thing... the obvious dumber people
in the future will have to do "just sign this power of attorney to create an
account with us."

~~~
mritchie712
do you really think a billion+ dollar company (Plaid) would "steal all your
money"? That's a pretty silly statement. More realistic to think they have
shitty security practices and could be hacked. FWIW, I worked at a large bank
for over a decade and a fintech after that, the fintech had better security
practices.

------
throwaway13000
So, pertinent question. I want to move my account to a bank which gives me an
API so I don't have to deal with Plaid or Mint. I.e. I want data privacy. I
want to build a personal dashboard of where my money is going.

Any suggestions?

~~~
mmckelvy
What about OCR'ing (or extracting from an electronic PDF) your bank statement
each month and then parsing the data into your desired format? You could add
tags, metadata, etc. as well.

I'm thinking of something where you download your statement (usually available
in PDF form) and then drag it to a web interface where it then gets OCR'd and
processed.

A bit more manual, but the upside is you're not leaking your creds and you
should also have access to more data (banks have to provide statements and
they usual provide them going back many years).

~~~
JshWright
Every bank I use provides _some_ sort of structured data export (at the very
least a csv, and in most cases a more finance-specific format (OFX, etc). I'm
not talking "modern" banks here, either (Ironically, the most modern bank I
use, Aspiration, only provides exports in a non-standard csv format)

------
tempsy
Have to say I'm not a fan of Plaid at all.

Dark patterns galore. Absolutely no indication when you go through a Plaid
flow that you're likely giving away much more than just the bare minimum
account numbers to push money in/out of your bank account. Often, you're also
giving away transaction data, identity, real-time balance, etc. There's no way
to know prior to linking your account.

I had high hopes that would have made things more transparent given the new
CCPA laws that went into effect on the 1st but have not seen anything change.

Edit: I think the 4D chess move here by Visa is the amount of data Plaid has.
Bank transaction data from _all_ types of transactions, not just Visa ones, is
massively valuable.

If people were concerned about Google acquiring Fitbit data I would be
_incredibly_ concerned about Visa basically buying all financial transaction
data...the FTC should really investigate the acquisition.

~~~
markandrewj
I have been interested in the idea of and open API for banking (one which
supports Canadian banks would be preferable, as I am Canadian), and I have had
a few ideas for application's to implement with Plaid. I keep reading feedback
about Plaid on HN similar to yours though that make me less confident in the
product.

~~~
ajcodez
Keep in mind every pull for transactions will cost money so you need to charge
enough per month to cover those costs. It’s closer to $1 than a penny like
most APIs.

~~~
robertbmenke
Yikes, $1 per transaction pull? Wonder if there's a way to only pull
transactions when a charge for a specific vendor comes across.

------
cowpig
Why is a duopoly like Visa/Mastercard allowed to make acquisitions in its own
space?

~~~
sithadmin
It's not a duopoly? In the US, AMEX and Discover aren't _that_ difficult to
use, and a fair amount of retailers accept in-house credit accounts and
international creditors like JCB and UnionPay. Payment via debit networks is
still very common, and low-tech forms of payment such as cash and checks are
still acceptable in many use cases.

~~~
tempsy
Amex and Discover are different as those are closed-network.

I think it's really hard to argue Visa/MC is not a duopoly. Unfortunately
anti-trust enforcement in the US has been more political than anything.

~~~
sbahr001
I would say this is an example where a duopoly is useful for consumers. The
duopoly allows consumers the ability to use a credit card pretty much anywhere
they want in the US; This is pretty convenient if you use a credit card
responsively. It is also a better solution than the old days where you would
have store cards or a store account. (I am not saying the duopoly is great
because these companies are a massive headache for businesses, and increase
the cost of things)

~~~
thesimon
>I would say this is an example where a duopoly is useful for consumers. The
duopoly allows consumers the ability to use a credit card pretty much anywhere
they want in the US

Going by that reasoning a monopoly would be even better, as the card would be
accepted everywhere.

The consumer pays by lack of innovation and high scheme fees.

------
sandGorgon
Plaid scrapes bank credentials to enable challengers vs banks. VISA seems to
be officially taking a stand with fintechs and challengers. So a bank can no
longer piss off VISA & refuse scraping.

But here's my bigger bet. Using this, VISA will launch a competitor to FICO.

~~~
dpflan
It'll serve as a means for VISA to even more strategically target customers
for its financial products/services.

------
lemax
Plaid and the broader explosion of white-label fintech infrastructure is
great. Ultimately, it increases the number of companies that can enter the
space and provide more competitive loan management tools, decision engines,
identity verification, credit, wealth management, and so on to consumers.
License the most complex/costly infrastructure, and then progressively swap
out those vendor provided capabilities with internal platforms as they scale
up (e.g. Revolut).

There's still lots of problems to solve in the connectivity space that Plaid
sits in, and the pursuit of some kind of unified open personal finance data
standard isn't really on the table for those steering the big initiatives
(e.g. FDX). This is mostly due to the variety of the data and number of
players (tens of thousands of institutions). For more on that, this interview
with Jeff Leathers, founder of Quovo, a similar company that was acquired by
Plaid in 2019 is not a bad listen:

[https://medium.com/wharton-fintech/podcast-with-lowell-
putna...](https://medium.com/wharton-fintech/podcast-with-lowell-putnam-co-
founder-and-ceo-of-quovo-421954a8962d)

------
nailer
Plaid is the scraping app US fintech startups had to use before
[https://teller.io](https://teller.io) (which uses the bank's own native APIs
and therefore goes down way less) launched there. Good timing for the Plaid
exit. Teller will eat their lunch.

------
ablekh
Abstracting away from this specific case, it is IMO just another example of
potential very significant and real risks of being reliant upon cloud or, more
generally, technological platforms operated by potentially acquirable
companies. While some acquired companies remain relatively independent and
continue offering original products (in short-to-medium term), many don't [I
have compiled a long list of case studies ...]. And if this (along with IT
security) doesn't make most CTOs and/or CIOs to wake up in the middle of the
night, then I don't know what does. Industry consolidation is IMO a pretty
scary, but probably inevitable, trend. I think that the safest approach (sans
some corner cases, e.g., a unique technology) is to build one company's
technology platform on an "unacquirable" technology infrastructure (for the
cloud, that would be AWS, Azure and, to somewhat lesser extent, GCP).
Thoughts?

------
curiousDog
Curious what happens to options that are yet to vest when a company gets
acquired like this? I had a potential offer from them and I'll be losing some
sleep tonight :(

~~~
smeyer
There's some flexibility, but often the unvested options in the acquired
company are converted into unvested options in the acquiring company on the
same schedule.

~~~
joewadcan
> often the unvested options in the acquired company are converted into
> unvested options in the acquiring company on the same schedule

Yup, and I'd clarify that the new options aren't 1:1, but calculated based on
some price-per-share of the acquired company.

------
lejohnq
From the documents at: [https://investor.visa.com/events-calendar/Event-
Details/2020...](https://investor.visa.com/events-calendar/Event-
Details/2020/Visa-Inc-To-Acquire-Plaid/default.aspx)

Deal is

* $4.9B cash consideration

* $400m retention equity as VISA RSUs

------
semerda
Congrats to Plaid!

Overall, I'm no fan to these scrapers. Apart from the army of engineers
(internal cost) required to maintain them, on the outside they sell a promise
that is putting user's privacy at risk. This is especially prevalent in the
bookkeeping space.

Many "me too apps" stitch their services using Plaid to provide bookkeepers
with bank feeds & statements for their clients.

Other's use Xero's HubDoc (which Xero paid 70m for few years back) which
basically does the same thing; scraping financial statements from many online
services using a combination of tools and humans. It's a goldmine for hackers;
plain text logins are stored in their database to practically many online
accounts owned by business owners.

Amazing to what degree people will go to to save few hours of labor each
month.

------
pilingual
Visa's presentation on the acquisition:

[https://www.scribd.com/document/442819888/Visa-Inc-to-
Acquir...](https://www.scribd.com/document/442819888/Visa-Inc-to-Acquire-
Plaid-Presentation)

~~~
keithwhor
That's interesting... 200M accounts on Plaid.

You gotta figure that's near the top of the S-Curve, right? Very close to 100%
of the TAM in the US, and I would imagine that global expansion is costly
given banking regulations in different regions. Visa already has the
reputation / relationships to push forward there.

Congrats to the team!

------
eerrt
Do the early employees get a huge payout on their options?

~~~
ryanSrich
Even if they had really shitty agreements I bet they'll see something
substantial. Reports are saying it was a 5.3 billion purchase price. That's a
lot of money for 400 employees.

~~~
alecbenzer
Having 400 employees doesn't say much about how equity is distributed, though.
E.g., (made up numbers, I know nothing about Plaid's comp specifically) if an
employee gets 1 basis point over 4 years, that's 0.01% * $5.3 billion / 4 =
$132,500, which combined with a startup salary might land you at around Google
L4.

~~~
harryh
Unless plaid's equity structure was very unusual, early employees (at least in
engineering) certainly received much much more than 1 basis point.

~~~
alecbenzer
Sure, but what's early? I don't think it's unheard of to get to O(1 basis
point) at 100s of employees.

I've seen an offer at a ~50 person company for 1-2 basis points.

------
sdan
Really don't like Plaid because they normalize phising. Surprised they aren't
being condoned for this.

~~~
cowpig
I think you mean "condemned"? To condone is to (often implicitly) approve of
something that is ethically or morally dubious.

~~~
sdan
Yes, I think condemned is probably a better word!

------
Rainymood
Guess they survived the 3.5 year security risk [0]...

>7 points by Rainymood on June 21, 2016 [-]

>I'm going to be really rude here (forgive me) but I feel like every time a
security question comes up you dodge the question really hard.

>I want to know one thing: If I log into your service with my bank
credentials. Do you store these as plaintext files (or "encrypted" files of
which you have the encryption key)? Yes/No.

>Furthermore, congratulations! I've been trying to start something up like
this in Europe but I feel like there are way more restrictions in Europe on
banking data and this kind of third-party aggregation. Sorry for being so
rude.

Here is some previous news on Plaid on HN.

* 2016-06-20 Fintech Firm Plaid Raises $44M (wsj.com)[1]

* 2018-12-11 Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation (techcrunch.com)[2]

* 2020-01-14 Visa Buys Plaid (wsj.com)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939103)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654880)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654880)

------
pilingual
Visa invested in their Series C[0], so it seems unusual that they'd also
acquire the company (why not acquire it back then?). Any ideas why this might
have happened? Past examples?

[0] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid#section-
fundin...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid#section-funding-
rounds)

~~~
mbesto
> so it seems unusual that they'd also acquire the company (why not acquire it
> back then?)

Not unusual at all. Pretty typical for CVC in fact. Couple of factors:

1\. CVC (Corporate Venture Capital) typically tries to invest in similar
markets of companies that either are competitive or pseduo-competitive (think
of it as a hedge). For example, this would be like PayPal investing in Venmo.

2\. It's cheaper in the long run for a CVC to make 10 of these bets to find
that one that doesn't kill their core business model (usually a cash cow).
That's why you see Ford/GM putting money into self-driving car start-ups.

3\. They were probably not at the level of scale ready for Visa to take them
on at the time of the Series C. This was basically a down-payment for their
eventual acquisition. It basically "you're too risky for us to buy, so here's
some money that we can write off if you end up failing, but if you do fail, we
don't have to deal with all of the crap that goes with a failing bus unit
(layoffs, compliance, etc).

~~~
pilingual
Great points (as well as the other comments).

I'm curious to learn more about strategy here since Paul Graham says there
probably aren't more Googles because companies are acquired too soon. Facebook
is famous for the Yahoo! offer. Stripe would have been a great acquisition (if
they would have accepted any).

[http://paulgraham.com/googles.html](http://paulgraham.com/googles.html)

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/403183731449413632?s=20](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/403183731449413632?s=20)

------
semerda
Open Banking Standards in Commonwealth Countries will make the need for these
scrapers redundant and limit the tools use to the US only.

Never been a fan of scrapers. Very unreliable and a big security hole
especially when MFA is used.

I wonder if the tightening data privacy regulations (CCPA et al) forced them
to sell or whether it was just a good sale opportunity.

------
denkmoon
There is a service like this in Australia, POLi. It's used almost exclusively
to facilitate EFT transactions to vendors that can't use the regular channels
like PayPal, local Banks, or Mastercard/Visa. ie. Porno, gambling, bitcoins,
drugs.

I learned about it by working in gambling. I cannot believe that people are OK
with just giving their online banking details to a company. It's insane! but
people are willing to use it because there is almost no other way of getting
the product they want.

Take the legislative risk out of handling those types of transactions, and
shit like this will disappear.

------
j_coder
Who uses Plaid for ACH verification must start to think on alternatives. Visa
blocked PayPal to growth its ACH payments a few years ago.

------
dsalzman
"but that ignores the path dependency of one market using cash until recently,
and the other receiving unsolicited Bank Americards 51 years ago. Once a job
is done — and credit cards do their jobs very well — it takes a 10x
improvement to get users to switch, and, in a three-sided network, that 10x is
10^3."

------
jijji
ACH services using any kind of API is and has been a pain today.... Im using
intuit and they have no good API, it forces you to do a redirect similar to
paypal. You basically have to write your own screen scrape tool to integrate
with these people.

------
yalogin
Didn't know such a thing existed till now. They took the feature that mint and
others built early on and turned it into a business. Awesome. Have no idea how
good it is but a multibillion dollar exit is great.

~~~
tommoor
Pretty sure Mint was built on Yodlee, a Plaid competitor

------
dugmartin
I’m wondering if this will make Plaid’s pricing more or less opaque. Right now
it’s go build it and then negotiate a rate. I think they would get a lot more
uptake if they had upfront pricing.

~~~
jamiequint
Nearly every large SaaS company has opaque pricing because price
discrimination allows them to make far more money than they would if they had
published prices.

------
spencerwgreene
The WSJ updated the article this links to with the transaction price, $5.3
billion, "Visa to Pay $5.3 Billion for Fintech Startup." Maybe the HN title
for this item should be updated?

------
e-clinton
Plaid is trash. Doesn’t work with 2FA and is super unreliable. It’s crazy that
a project with so many faults could be financially successful.

------
guelo
Banking regulators should mandate open banking APIs and default-private, non-
sellable transaction data. The fact that they don't means that they don't work
for us, government has been turned into a tool to enable and encourage rent-
seeking. The "deregulation" obsession in this country is turning us all into
modern feudal serfs, we have no option but to toil in our Lords' properties
without recourse.

------
chrisbennet
It would interesting to know if the employees saw any for that money.

------
j45
This is too bad if they sell this prematurely

~~~
whoisjuan
5.3 billion is not premature. That's a fucking jackpot for a company that only
raised 350MM.

~~~
j45
I wish them well - could they have grown to be much more?

------
mrfusion
Plaid?

Edit: I guess I’ll look up their homepage, and try to scroll through the
marketing speak to figure it out. Seems like it would be nice if someone in
the know could just tell us.

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justinzollars
Congratulations to the Plaid team!

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kdot
Still waiting for the Zelle API.

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forgreens
Please I wanna know how to work

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neonate
[http://archive.md/tQfZJ](http://archive.md/tQfZJ)

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forgreens
I wanna know how to work

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m3kw9
So visa has been plaid?

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node-bayarea
For $5.3 Billion!!!

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hashyi
Heard they were offering .1 percent for senior software engineers 6 months
ago. Congrats guys!

(source:[https://www.teamblind.com/post/Plaid-acquired-by-Visa-
for-5B...](https://www.teamblind.com/post/Plaid-acquired-by-Visa-
for-5B-wBKnUPrz))

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chrisblackwell
FFS...can anyone run a business these days without XYZ company getting
acquired.

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sgt
At least we'll be able to say... They've gone into plaid!

~~~
skocznymroczny
When I was a kid, I always laughed at the "F*, even in the future nothing
works" quote. Now that I am a software engineer, I just get sad.

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xj9
i always hope that new exciting companies will work towards a sustainable
business model that can exist without a buyout from some mega. i understand
that its difficult to start a business, much less a sustainable one, but its
sad to see such promising companies grow into a pitch instead of a business.

maybe its a good thing i didn't get hired for their SLC office, because i
would have quit over this.

~~~
erikig
Out of curiousity, why would this acquisition be a reason to quit?

~~~
xj9
to me this move indicates weakness. its a fine exit for the early employees
and the executive team, but there's no reason to sell if you have a solid
business plan and a realistic vision for future profitability. maybe the only
vision for the future they want to pursue involves some expensive investment
or the business was built on massive debt that can only be paid of in this
way.

i want to be a part of building something that can survive as an independent
entity. selling is an admission that this is either not a goal or not possible
given the current position of the company. both of these are against my
ethics. why should i stay at a company that has openly admitted that they are
incapable or unwilling to pursue independence?

~~~
PragmaticPulp
At this point, what difference does it make? Visa can survive as an
independent, profitable entity by your criteria.

> but there's no reason to sell if you have a solid business plan and a
> realistic vision for future profitability.

They had 5.3 billion reasons to sell. With an acquisition offer that high,
it's not about the company's ability to survive independently. It's about
doing what's in the best financial interests of the company and employees.

> i want to be a part of building something that can survive as an independent
> entity. selling is an admission that this is either not a goal or not
> possible given the current position of the company. both of these are
> against my ethics. why should i stay at a company that has openly admitted
> that they are incapable or unwilling to pursue independence?

Your distinction is a bit arbitrary. Plaid wasn't a fully independent company
after they took significant money. Take a look at their board of directors.
Only 2 out of 5 board members were Plaid executives. They had already "sold"
part of the company when you applied.

~~~
xj9
i didn't say "fully independent" i talked about a willingness to pursue
independence. that's the difference that i care about. i value independence
more than money. you do need a certain amount of money to be autonomous, but
its about end goals. i don't agree with the end goal of "make the best
business deals for the biggest amount of money". besides, long-term you make
way more money if you are independent. i have respect for visa and i'd work
there because they do value independence, but i wouldn't work for a subsidiary
who couldn't hack it as a competitor.

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masterjack
Anyone know if this acquisition is a win for Plaid, or are they are just
panicking before bank API middleware becomes commoditized (e.g.
[http://paysli.com/](http://paysli.com/) offering free authentication)

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cliqueiq
I see a lot of hate for Plaid here. I was my understanding that the only
reason you would really ever use Plaid is because they were able give
programmatic access to flat-rate fee ACH payments of basically any size.
Obviously they were never something you could compare to Stripe. I wonder
what's gonna happen with in the near future, especially considering Plaid was
obviously stepping on the toes of the interchange-rates of the likes of Visa.

~~~
jaf656s
Plaid provides an api to access transaction history and verify bank account
ownership.

They don't do ACH transfers.

~~~
cliqueiq
[https://fin.plaid.com/articles/inside-ach-payments-with-
stri...](https://fin.plaid.com/articles/inside-ach-payments-with-stripe-and-
plaid/)

"""To get started with ACH payments, you need a system that can connect you
(the originator of the ACH transaction) with an Originating Depository
Financial Institution (ODFI). Additionally, that system should be able to give
updates on the status of the payment and give the developer an interface to
authenticate, verify, and charge the user on demand.

That’s where Stripe comes in. In January, the payments infrastructure giant
debuted support for ACH payments through its platform alongside a partnership
with us here at Plaid. Now, Stripe users can authenticate their customers
through Plaid (or, if they must, micro-deposits) and then charge them through
ACH."""

Am I misunderstanding something?

EDIT:

Okay so maybe they weren't doing the transfers, but they were certainly
facilitating them and adding to the adoption of more ACH based payments (which
means less credit-card payments). Same conflict of interest applies. What does
Visa care about bank account verifications?

