Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga. Photo credit: World Economic Forum / Sikarin Thanachaiary, under Creative Commons license

Payments giant Mastercard has announced it’s reached a deal to acquire Finicity, a Utah-based financial data company that was founded two decades ago. Finicity has been a private company since its founding and has raised some $80 million in funding since its inception, its last funding round being in 2018. Mastercard is paying $825 million upfront to acquire Finicity, plus an additional potential earnout of $160 million set in place. Mastercard’s acquisition comes on the heels of the acquisition of another Utah-based financial data startup, Galileo, by SoFi. SoFi, a private fintech, coughed up $1.2 billion in cash and stock for Galileo.

Finicity is a financial data aggregation and insights platform whose product is adopted by fintech and financial services companies to facilitate their banking services. It’s basically a connector between consumers and fintech services, similar to the likes of Plaid and Galileo, which have sold to payments firms for big money in recent times. Plaid was scooped up by Mastercard competitor Visa for a whopping $5.3 billion earlier this year. Galileo sold to SoFi for $1.2 billion. It seems financial data aggregators are the hot new products that payments firms are chasing for.

Finicity was founded in 2000 but raised its first outside funding eight years after its founding, followed by subsequent rounds in 2016 and 2018. The company has only two known investors; Experian, a consumer credit reporting giant, and San Jose-based investment bank Bridge Bank. With Mastercard’s Finicity purchase deal adding up to about $1 billion, it’s safe to say both companies have secured juicy returns on their investments.

Finicity currently employs about 500 people. The company maintains offices in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Mumbai, India.