Aggregators Gain Scale Lose Pricing Power
Charles Birnbaum, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, on the five waves of fintech
Low contract values usually mean the company is selling convenience, not a budget owner level outcome. Aggregators and universal APIs solve the messy work of connecting to hundreds or thousands of systems, standardizing fields, and keeping connectors alive. That creates broad demand and lots of customers. But unless the product also helps customers make more money, stop fraud, approve users faster, or move money, buyers often treat it like plumbing and push hard on price.
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Plaid is the clearest example. It scaled by making bank connectivity easy for thousands of fintechs, but as bank data access became more interchangeable across Plaid, Yodlee, Finicity, and MX, pricing power tightened. That is why Plaid kept moving into enrichment, verification, and payments, where the product is closer to a business result than a raw connection.
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Universal API founders describe the core product as aggregation, access, and standardization. The customer is paying to avoid building and maintaining a huge matrix of integrations. That is valuable, but it is still mostly labor savings. The bigger contracts appear when the API unlocks a concrete workflow like payroll deductions, direct deposit switching, underwriting, or fraud controls.
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This creates a common shape in the market. The base connector layer can spread widely because many software companies need it, but it also gets commoditized over time as partners open APIs, competitors copy coverage, and AI lowers connector building costs. Enduring winners add higher value products on top of the rails, or own hard to replicate partner relationships and proprietary data.
The next wave is less about who connects the most systems and more about who turns those connections into decisions and actions. The companies that graduate from low ACV infrastructure into high ACV platforms will be the ones that sit closer to risk, revenue, and workflow, where replacing them would force the customer to give up real operating leverage.