Plaid

Plaid publicly endorsed and helped shape the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's October 2024 finalised Section 1033 rule under the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires banks to allow consumers to share their financial data with third-party fintech services on demand and free of charge. Plaid's lobbying and amicus participation supported a positive consumer-protection outcome despite the rule's competitive implications for incumbent banks. The rule was a major win for open-banking advocates and consumer data portability.

Plaid agreed in August 2022 to a $58 million class-action settlement resolving claims that it collected and stored more banking-account data than users authorized when granting connection permissions to fintech apps. The settlement also required Plaid to delete certain stored data and improve transparency about what is collected. The settlement followed the DOJ-blocked $5.3B Visa acquisition (abandoned January 2021), in which the DOJ argued Plaid was a unique competitive threat in financial-data plumbing.

Visa and Plaid jointly announced on January 12, 2021 that they had abandoned Visa's $5.3 billion proposed acquisition of Plaid after the US Department of Justice filed a November 2020 antitrust lawsuit. The DOJ complaint, citing internal Visa documents, alleged that Visa's CEO described Plaid as an 'existential' threat in financial-data plumbing and that the acquisition was an 'insurance policy' to neutralize a future debit-payments competitor.