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Visa Abandons $5.3B Acquisition of Plaid Over DOJ Antitrust Concerns

The Department of Justice announced Tuesday the deal is off.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 10:55 a.m. Published Jan 12, 2021, 10:13 p.m.

Visa called off its $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid, the fintech firm serving as a fiat bridge for a number of crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.

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The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday the two companies have officially called off their planned merger in the wake of the DOJ's lawsuit last year that sought to block the deal.
The DOJ filed a civil antitrust suit on Nov. 5, 2020, to stop the merger, claiming Visa is a monopolist in online debit, charging both consumers and merchants billions of dollars in fees each year to process online payments.
"Now that Visa has abandoned its anticompetitive merger, Plaid and other future fintech innovators are free to develop potential alternatives to Visa's online debit services," Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim said in a statement. "With more competition, consumers can expect lower prices and better services."
As CoinDesk previously reported, Plaid has worked with Coinbase and at least two decentralized finance (DeFi) startups.
The DOJ reported Plaid earned approximately $100 million in revenue in 2019.

Visa Department of Justice Antitrust Plaid

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.