Visa has struck a €1.8bn deal to buy Swedish fintech Tink, less than six months after a previous attempt to buy its US rival Plaid was blocked by regulators.
Tink develops technology that allows third parties to connect to customer data from different financial institutions, enabling them to offer services such as account aggregation and payments that bypass traditional card networks such as Visa’s.
Regulators have been trying to encourage services such as those offered by Tink as a way to encourage more competition and choice in the European payments market, and in 2018 introduced “open banking” rules that forced banks to allow these companies to access their data.
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