Plaid Buys Quovo To Help Developers Build Data-Driven Apps

Plaid, the FinTech company that enables developers to create financial services applications, announced Tuesday (Jan. 8) that it has acquired Quovo to make it easier for developers to create products that include investment data.

In a blog post, Zach Perret and William Hockey, co-founders at Plaid, said that while most financial apps use Plaid technology to interact with checking and savings accounts, the deal with Quovo will extend its reach into more areas. Quovo, according to Plaid, created a platform for investment and brokerage aggregation and is used by a lot of the big players in wealth management. Customers of Quovo include FinTechs such as Betterment, Wealthfront and SoFi, along with traditional wealth management companies such as Stifel, Vanguard, Empower Retirement and John Hancock.

“Our goal is to make money easier for everyone, and doing so requires that we consider consumers’ financial lives holistically. We’re excited to work with the Quovo team to enable this,” the executives wrote in the blog post. “Together, we’ll build a single platform that developers and large companies alike can use to build any financial application — from payments to lending to wealth management.”

The Plaid founders noted in the blog post that last year was a big growth period for financial technology and as 2019 begins, Plaid is aiming to create a fully-enabled, digitally-delivered financial system that gives consumers both convenience and control across all their financial assets. The acquisition of Quovo for an undisclosed sum comes a few weeks after Plaid announced it raised $250 million in venture funding, bringing its total venture funding to $310 million. The company now has a valuation of $2.65 billion. The Series C round was led by venture capitalist Mary Meeker, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Plaid’s previous investors Goldman Sachs, NEA and Spark Capital.