It is still called a "merger" if one company is buying out another company. Don't we normally call that an acquisition?
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Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
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Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#22Finicity is already a great alternative to Plaid.
I imagine bottles of champagne are popping at Mastercard HQ right now.
Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#23Whatever you think about Visa or this merger, this would be a major disappoint to Plaid's team members who thought they were in for a huge financial windfall. If that applies to anyone here, my sympathies and best of luck figuring out what's next for Plaid. Hopefully the morale hit isn't too big on the team.
The vast majority of tech workers that receive equity stakes in pre-IPO/acquisition companies don't ever see any financial windfall from their stakes. These guys will be just fine.
Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#24Whatever you think about Visa or this merger, this would be a major disappoint to Plaid's team members who thought they were in for a huge financial windfall. If that applies to anyone here, my sympathies and best of luck figuring out what's next for Plaid. Hopefully the morale hit isn't too big on the team.
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Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#25Whatever you think about Visa or this merger, this would be a major disappoint to Plaid's team members who thought they were in for a huge financial windfall. If that applies to anyone here, my sympathies and best of luck figuring out what's next for Plaid. Hopefully the morale hit isn't too big on the team.
Agreed, except for one point.
Please don't call it a windfall. Anyone in that company that would have seen life changing amounts of money has likely put incredible effort and hard work into making this happen.
Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s like oauth except you type your password for site A into a box on site B’s domain Pretty wild it even exists
It is a hack around regulatory failure to mandate this functionality at finance firms (both Congress and the Fed have failed in this regard). The Fed's instant payments product (FedNow [1]) goes live in 2023, which is going to put downward pressure on Visa's debit business. The Fed only began to move on instant payments when pressured by Congress [2] (who didn't want smaller banks held hostage by Early Warning System…
Does FedNow solve all of the problems Plaid solves? I'm thinking specifically about Plaid functionality that lets consumers expose transaction history, investments, etc.
It would appear that FedNow solves for "How do I get money into my Schwab brokerage account?" but not "How can I let Schwab do risk analysis across all my investment accounts?"
Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#27Whatever you think about Visa or this merger, this would be a major disappoint to Plaid's team members who thought they were in for a huge financial windfall. If that applies to anyone here, my sympathies and best of luck figuring out what's next for Plaid. Hopefully the morale hit isn't too big on the team.
They'll get some $$$ out of it, and I have no doubt that they have a solid future as an independent company. The fintech sector is red hot right now. Heck they might even be able to catch the next IPO wave.
SPAC SPAC SPAC SPAC SPAC
Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#28Whatever you think about Visa or this merger, this would be a major disappoint to Plaid's team members who thought they were in for a huge financial windfall. If that applies to anyone here, my sympathies and best of luck figuring out what's next for Plaid. Hopefully the morale hit isn't too big on the team.
This comment strikes a nerve with me - perhaps because it's "saying the quiet part loud". I thought the typical goal of hackers and startups was to "change the world" and "make a difference". How does selling to Visa accomplish those things? Isn't expressing sympathy with Plaid's staff for not getting a payout effectively saying "sorry that you might actually have to deliver on the lofty promises this time"?
It's also kind of indicative of how small startup ambitions have become. Acquisition has become a measure of success, not failure.
Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#29I'm surprised by this. I used to work in Foster City. The joke on the campus was that VISA stood for "Very Inconspicuous Spy Agency". You'd think that there wouldn't be this kind of miscommunication in the chain of command. All jokes aside, I'm very curious to check out Plaid now because I didn't pay attention when it was independent and Visa is a *very* smart organization, so Plaid must be something special.
>Plaid must be something special. It's not so much that Plaid is "something special" but that US banks are stuck in the 1950's technologically. Plaid shouldn't exist. It only exists because banks refuse to create open APIs for others to integrate with. With that said, Plaid has done a fantastic job.
Never used Plaid but didn't they require your banking credentials and also didn't have a very secure mechanism for storing them?
Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block
#30Whatever you think about Visa or this merger, this would be a major disappoint to Plaid's team members who thought they were in for a huge financial windfall. If that applies to anyone here, my sympathies and best of luck figuring out what's next for Plaid. Hopefully the morale hit isn't too big on the team.
Agreed, except for one point. Please don't call it a windfall. Anyone in that company that would have seen life changing amounts of money has likely put incredible effort and hard work into making this happen.
Interesting, I just thought a windfall meant "a lot of money at once", but it looks like you're right that it implies luck. So agreed, a different word would be more accurate here.