Financial services software company Envestnet (ENV) announced on Monday that it has acquired financial data mining and technology company Yodlee in a cash and stock transaction valued at $18.88 per share, or approximately $660 million. After incorporating about $70 million in cash and cash equivalents, the deal is valued at about $590 million.
Founded in 1999, Yodlee (YDLE) powers a technology that allows banking institutions and online financial managers to aggregate consumer financial data. It allows consumers to aggregate their credit card statements, bank accounts, and investment portfolio in one website. Its customers include 11 of the 20 largest U.S. Banks ranked by assets, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Over the past year, it created a smaller unit, Yodlee Interactive, which provides application program interfaces (APIs) to startups in the financial sector, as well as an accelerator program for startups.
Yodlee says it has 20 million paid users. The company, which went public on the NASDAQ in October 2014, generated revenues of $98.6 million for year ended June 30, 2015.
The company recently came under fire for how much consumer transaction data it shares with financial institutions in its network. The Journal report asserts that Yodlee sells data it gathers from credit card and debit transactions to investors and research firms, and points to a study from MIT that claims the data can be de-anonymized. Yodlee has refuted the latter, saying that the data passed on to banks for research is scrubbed of any personally identifiable information and can’t be walked back to a person’s identity. Nevertheless, this data-selling part of Yodlee’s business has been quietly operating for at least a year, Coins2Day has learned, and the company is slowly beginning to publicly talk about it.
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2015 or in the first quarter of 2016.
