Yet another Plaid-Visa take

"Visa is a $500 billion market capitalization company -- rivaling the size of JP Morgan and Bank of America. They understand network businesses, and why those are better than pure software-as-a-service businesses. Building a multi-sided network, which includes merchants, consumers, banks, regulators, and global complexity creates an incredible barrier to entry and a profoundly defensible revenue generator. All you need to do is for users to generate economic activity between themselves, and take a tiny cut. The Visa model relies on human nature, not the quota of your sales people."

"Once you have aggregated 200 million logins and can cause money movement between bank accounts, you become a de facto payments network. In Europe, the PSD2 directive mandates that all banks open up their APIs to allow both information aggregation and money movement by licensed third parties. In the US, we are still trying to crowbar information out of the banks through screen-scraping. But the direction of travel is clear -- data is money, and the bots will move it around."