It is all go for investment bankers covering fintech companies.
In late June, JPMorgan acquired UK robo-adviser Nutmeg and announced it will also buy OpenInvest, a San Francisco-based platform that builds ESG-based portfolios for wealth managers and their clients.
Visa, whose attempt to buy Plaid was blocked on competition grounds in January, will now pay €1.8 billion for Swedish open-banking platform Tink. Founded in 2012, Tink today claims to connect through one application programming interface (API) to more than 3,400 banks with 250 million customers across Europe.
The financial industry giants, ever fearful of big tech companies encroaching onto their turf, have identified the more promising fintechs now emerging from the mass of start-ups in the past decade and are buying them to capture their scale-up potential.
We want to really penetrate this market and create a utility-like infrastructure for moving savings
However, not all fintechs are selling out. Wise, the company formerly known as TransferWise – a pioneer of cheap and fast ways to send money across borders that now also offers a multi-currency account and debit card to its 10 million customers – is set to list directly on the London Stock Exchange.
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