Tag Archives: plaid

Plaid Acquires Quovo: Flash briefing for January 10, 2019

Here are the links to today’s top stories:

Logging In to Your Bank Account Is Now a $3 Billion Business from Bloomberg

Quovo is joining Plaid from Plaid.com

SEC sanctions robo-advisers Wealthfront, Hedgeable from Reuters

Introducing the All-New Wealthbox Mobile App for iOS from Wealthbox

[Disclosure: I provided marketing services to Wealthbox within the last 12 months. See all my disclosures at fppad.com/disclaimer ]

Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.

Plaid Acquires Quovo

Financial account aggregation provider Plaid started off 2019 with one of the first large #fintech acquisitions, announcing earlier this week that it will acquire Quovo, a competing account aggregation company, in a deal that Bloomberg reported could be worth roughly $200 million dollars after performance bonuses are factored in to the price.

Most consumers aren’t aware of Plaid, as the company focuses on helping other financial applications such as Venmo, Betterment, and Robinhood, connect to customer bank and credit card accounts in order to verify account information. According to a company blog post, Plaid will use the Quovo acquisition to expand its data aggregation capabilities to include investment and brokerage accounts.

SEC Fines Wealthfront and Hedgeable

In regulatory news, the Securities and Exchange Commission took its first enforcement actions on two automated investment services, commonly referred to as robo-advisors, as it fined both Wealthfront and Hedgeable for making false statements in marketing materials to potential customers.

The SEC fined Wealthfront $250,000 dollars for claiming the company would avoid all wash-sale transactions in its tax-loss harvesting algorithms, when three years of trading history showed that wash sales were indeed triggered in at least 31 percent of customer accounts. The SEC also issued an $80,000 fine to Hedgeable for allegedly misleading portfolio performance reports that included performance data from less than 4 percent of client accounts.

Wealthbox Releases All-New Mobile App for iOS

And finally, in CRM news for financial advisers this week, Wealthbox announced the release of an all-new mobile app for iOS devices. The mobile companion to Wealthbox CRM supports Touch ID or Face ID for account authentication, single-tap quick actions for frequently used functions, support for native dictation, and more.

Here’s Steve Carroll, Product Manager for Wealthbox, with more information:

The all-new Wealthbox Mobile app is completely rebuilt and and redesigned for today’s modern financial advisor. This companion app is completely in sync with the full-featured functionality the web-based Wealthbox product, and has many convenient mobile features like bio authentication and native dictation for advisors on the go.

For more information on this news and more, head over to FPPad.com/flashbriefing to find the links to today’s top stories.

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I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.