Visa buys Swedish fintech startup Tink for $2.1 billion

Visa announced Thursday that it is acquiring Swedish financial tech startup Tink for $2.1 billion (1.8 billion euros) which includes cash and retention incentives. The deal will help bolster the payment giant’s digital ambitions.

The announcement comes after Visa abandoned the bid to buy Plaid, an American rival to Tink. Since then, Plaid has opted to go it alone as a private company and was last privately valued at  $13.4 billion.

We wrote about Tink two years ago after PayPal made an $11.2 million strategic investment in the company.

Founded in 2012 by Swedish entrepreneurs Daniel Kjellén and Fredrik Hedberg, Tink is a European open banking platform that provides the infrastructure and data products that are enabling the future of financial services. The startup offer products such as Account Aggregation, Payment Initiation, Data Enrichment, and Personal Finance Management that can be used to develop standalone services or be integrated into existing banking applications. Its partners include ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas Fortis, Nordea, Klarna, and SEB.

Tink enables financial institutions, fintech, and merchants to build tailored financial management tools, products, and services for European consumers and businesses based on their financial data. Tink initially started out as a financial management app but later pivoted to focus on providing its technology to other businesses instead.

“Visa is committed to doing all we can to foster innovation and empower consumers in support of Europe’s open banking goals,” Al Kelly, CEO and Chairman of Visa said in a statement. “By bringing together Visa’s network of networks and Tink’s open banking capabilities we will deliver increased value to European consumers and businesses with tools to make their financial lives more simple, reliable, and secure.”

Visa said the combination of Visa’s proven infrastructure and sustained investment in resilience, cybersecurity, and fraud prevention with Tink’s APIs, technology, and customer relationships is expected to help accelerate the adoption of open banking in Europe by ensuring a secure, reliable platform for innovation.

“For the past ten years we have worked relentlessly to build Tink into a leading open banking platform in Europe, and we are incredibly proud of what the whole team at Tink has created together. We have built something incredible and at the same time, we have only scratched the surface. Joining Visa, we will be able to move faster and reach further than ever before. Visa is the perfect partner for the next stage of Tink’s journey, and we are incredibly excited about what this will bring to our employees, customers, and for the future of financial services,” said Daniel Kjellén, CEO and Co-founder of Tink.