Credit card company Visa saves billions of dollars to acquire Plaid, a technology company that links bank accounts to apps for financial matters. With this step, the credit card company follows its counterparts who previously went on a takeover path to tap into new markets in the payment industry.

Visa pays $ 5.3 billion (€ 4.75 billion) for the Plaid founded in 2013. That is double the value that the start-up was assigned to an investment round in 2018. The acquisition is expected to be completed within three to six months

Among other things, Plaid provides the link between bank accounts and the Transferwise apps, for mutual money shipments, and Venmo, a PayPal payment app. A total of 200 million apps accounts are linked to Plaid, which works together with 11,000 financial institutions.

Established parties in the payment sector have been deeply concerned in recent years to remain at the forefront of technology. For example, Mastercard bought a large part of the Danish payment service provider for 2.9 billion euros last year.