Plaid acquires This Week in Fintech — and both founders explain why

Summary

Plaid has acquired This Week in Fintech, the fintech newsletter and media company that Nick Guillen built over six and a half years into a community with more than 200,000 subscribers. Plaid approached roughly five months before the deal closed — Guillen says he walked in expecting to sell a sponsorship and left having sold the company.

The editorial operation stays largely intact for now. Guillen frames the model as analogous to Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek: complementary properties under a shared parent, where a Plaid software customer doesn't need to read the media product and vice versa.

The strategic rationale sits on a coverage gap. Fintech companies that survived the 2021 funding surge and subsequent liquidity crunch have emerged leaner and are now genuinely taking market share from incumbent banks — but mainstream tech media, stretched across AI and crypto, isn't tracking them closely. Ramp is the example Guillen reaches for: a company that downsized, took the hard medicine, and is now shipping on a weekly cadence. The bet is that Plaid-backed media can serve the fintech insider audience that wants infrastructure-level detail on bank partnerships and platform evolution, not just top-line headlines.

On format, Guillen's priorities are events, deep written analysis, and international expansion. He argues that fintech innovation in markets like Mexico City and Lagos often outpaces the US because operators there have to build financial infrastructure from scratch rather than layer on top of existing systems. That international community focus has been core to the franchise and, under Plaid, is set to grow.