Tink

Daniel Kjellén and Fredrik Hedberg founded Tink in Stockholm in 2012 as a personal finance app that gathered all your accounts in one place. It turned out that the hard part, and therefore the sellable part, was the bank connections rather than the app. Tink pivoted into a supplier for banks, fintechs and merchants that need to read account data or initiate payments under PSD2.

Visa had first tried to buy America's Plaid, but the deal ran into a Justice Department antitrust suit and was abandoned in January 2021. Six months later Visa announced it would buy Tink for €1.8 billion, closing in 2022. A card network buying the plumbing for payments that bypass cards is either an insurance policy or irony.