Plaid To Focus On Growing European Market

FinTech startup Plaid is looking at doubling its size in Europe, Bloomberg reported.

The focus for the San Francisco-based company is now on broadening its global reach after an acquisition for $5.3 billion by Visa didn’t go through, the report stated.

Plaid allows users to securely connect and share data their financial accounts to their apps, like Venmo.

Plaid is looking to have around 80 employees in the London and Amsterdam offices by the end of the year, Bloomberg reported, which is up from the 40 to 50 there now.

Keith Grose, head of the company’s U.K. business, said Plaid is focusing on European growth because of the high demand it sees there for payments services, the report stated.

“We’re growing our team of Brits and Europeans,” Grose said, according to Bloomberg. “We are planning to aggressively scale the customers that we have and the volume of payments that we’re handling.”

The company, which counts Microsoft and Google as customers, is looking to build its products and keep developing, Bloomberg reported.

The Visa deal was scrapped, Bloomberg reported, after the prospect of a prolonged antitrust fight with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which centered around an argument that the card giant was looking to squash an emerging competitor to its business. The DOJ said the acquisition could have ended up resulting in higher prices and disadvantages to smaller competitors later on.

Visa, in response, said there was no threat to competitors by acquiring Plaid as Plaid is a company with a complementary interest, not a competing one. Visa said the antitrust concerns were too complicated to fight through and ended up nixing the tie-up.

According to Grose, the canceled deal won’t have much of an impact. He said Plaid’s strategy hasn’t been affected, and the company is “back to being a startup. We’re back to owning our own destiny.”