Stripe launches Plaid’s competitor? 🤯; Starbucks teases Web 3 pivot 👀; The birth of the second-biggest neobank in Europe 📲
Good Morning FinTech, 5 May
Good day Everyone,
And happy Thursday! Today’s 3 FinTech stories are undoubtedly the best ones this week so far. From Stripe launching Plaid’s competitor to further solidify its mission of building the ultimate API for the digital economy, to the emergence of the second-biggest neobank in Europe. You cannot miss these, so let’s jump straight into them:
Stripe launches Plaid’s competitor? 🤯
The launch 🚀 FinTech giant Stripe has launched Financial Connections, a product that enables its customers to connect to their customers’ bank accounts. That will, in turn, provide access to financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions. Businesses can now hence directly connect to customer bank accounts to verify transactions, perform risk management and support a variety of financial services. In short, it’s just a faster way to get financial data.
US POC🇺🇸 this service is reportedly going live first in the US, where Stripe said it will work with over 90% of all bank accounts. It will be charged on a pay-as-you-use basis — bank account verifications and account information will come at $1.50 per API call; account balance retrieval is 10 cents per API call; transaction pulls have yet to be launched so pricing is TBA — and bigger customers can buy on an enterprise contract. A more global launch hasn't been disclosed yet though it should be only a matter of time.
Plaid Copy-paste? 🤔 Given that Stripe's SME customer base is about to pass 3M, the FinTech giant is attempting to cement ties between those businesses and customers for payments and other financial services. Obviously, this makes a ton of sense for Stripe, but it also feels a lot like Plaid’s competitor…
But the fact that Stripe launched a competitor to Plaid (which once was their partner) isn’t the juiciest thing here. Plaid CEO said the guy who runs it took multiple interviews with Plaid and asked probing questions in interviews:
While we will leave this for the future to show who’s who, it’s clearly a big move from Stripe. Plaid and Stripe might be this century's Apple and Microsoft. Former partners becoming fierce competitors. Here’s the takeaway: