Tink Is Joining Visa

Tink was my favorite budget app with automatic connections to my Swedish bank. Until they decided to just close up shop and leave all their users hanging.<p>Now I guess they took all that valuable market data users provided by classifying all their purchases and signed a deal with visa.<p>Or at least that&#x27;s one negative assumption I can make as a former happy user of the Tink app.

I had never heard of them before but the website is incredibly fast, I know my internet connection didn&#x27;t just improve. If anyone can shed some light on how they&#x27;re doing it. Try navigating around and even change the website language. It is incredibly fast.

I&#x27;ve had the pleasure of working with the Tink API, along with their competitors like TrueLayer and Nordigen. This space is heating up really fast, and bank APIs are getting funded and gobbled up left and right. Tink&#x27;s console, website, and API is extremely clean, fast, and well thought-out. What was lacking the last time I checked is their customer support and clarity of the business offering. I&#x27;m sure this will improve very soon however.

I don&#x27;t like to be negative but Visa don&#x27;t strike me as flag-bearers for open-banking. Tink seems like a genuine product for making things more competitive instead of less but Visa&#x2F;Mastercard&#x2F;Amex are very famous for keeping the system closed down to benefit their own profits.<p>I hope this isn&#x27;t another shuttering of a competitor by acquisition.

Tink seems similar to Plaid, except focused on Europe?<p>The US DoJ got in the way of Visa&#x27;s attempted acquisition of Plaid last year.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sifted.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;plaid-visa-tink-europe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sifted.eu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;plaid-visa-tink-europe&#x2F;</a>

This is a $2B acquisition.<p>This isn’t for their budgeting app as many of the thread imply.<p>This is Visa wanting to get into Open Banking in a major way. Like MasterCard ~$1B acquisition of Finicity.

X is buying Y is not the same thing as Y is joining X. It&#x27;s almost like these founders are embarrassed about what was probably their plan all along.

I immediately checked the announcement for the word &quot;journey&quot;.<p>BINGO!

Tink started as a clone of Mint through data-sharing with Swedish banks. This was probably enabled by shared ownership somehow.

So if your bank partners with them, they&#x27;ll get access to your financial data and you have no say over that, only recourse to close your account (and what happens with the data already transferred)?<p>Or is it the kind of service that requires you to give them you bank access details (which is against T&amp;C of most of the banks)?<p>It seems like it&#x27;s just a data grab disguised as an API, but what do I know, maybe I am wrong...