A lot of action in the DMs today over the Visa-Plaid non-deal. Might as well make some of my thoughts public...

Winners: Plaid, Mastercard/Finicity, and future Plaid investors

Losers? Visa (maybe); banks (probably)

Plaid is likely worth even more now than a year ago.

Covid + continued digitization of finance is a tailwind. I wouldn't be surprised if the initial Visa offer also made working w/ Plaid more palatable to a lot of banks and aided traction.

Throw in a cryptic tweet from @chamath and Plaid's future prospects are probably pretty rosy (or tulip-y?) https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1349136603197755392

Mastercard made out well with Finicity in retrospect. They picked up the #2 player and no anti-trust headaches. Win-win there.

Visa is probably glad to be rid of the anti-trust headache, and avoided having their business model and market lead dissected in open court.

Visa's also got plenty of other cool things in the works. They'll be fine, but it's still a pity.

I think the banks lost an opportunity here to negotiate data access, use of data, & maybe even create a data sharing standard in collaboration with Visa. At the end of the day, Visa's customers are banks and they want to do right by them, including putting guardrails on data use

Overall, I think it's unfortunate the deal unraveled. I don't believe the DOJ suit really had merit.

Sure, Visa is the market leader, but they're in different businesses. Even if Plaid was moving towards money movement vs. just data access, anti-trust seems like a reach imho