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Portfolio company Plaid is expanding across the pond! The expansion will enable fintech startups in the UK to take advantage of open banking rules, while also enabling companies on either side of the Atlantic to expand across the U.S., U.K. and Canada.
Earlier this year, Plaid bought Quovo, another data aggregator that was one of the first companies to obtain an Account Information Service Provider license from U.K. regulators, meaning it can participate as a data aggregator in the open banking ecosystem that is developing in that country. The AISP approval is clearly an advantage to Plaid in this launch, though the company says the main reason Plaid acquired Quovo was for its support for wealth and investment data, where Plaid's work has been in gathering data from checking and savings accounts. The move also comes just a week after Plaid launched Plaid Direct, an integration specification that lets its fintech clients circumnavigate banks to share data directly with one another. For instance, Acorns, the investing and savings fintech, might share data with the financial management app Qapital.
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