Credit Karma, a popular credit monitoring and recommendation service, has acquired a London-based credit reporting service called Noddle. Following this acquisition, Credit Karma is expected to expand beyond the US and makes its way to the UK.
Noddle — which used to be owned by credit rating company TransUnion — is known as one of the first free credit check apps to launch in the UK. Noddle was part of TransUnion’s $1.4 billion acquisition of CallCredit earlier this year. Noddle currently has more than 4 million users.
“We are proud to have partnered with Credit Karma from its inception to empower tens of millions of consumers with the information they need to make smarter financial decisions,” said TransUnion’s president of the Consumer Interactive division John Danaher in a statement. “This deal represents an expansion of our mission to the United Kingdom, and we look forward to supporting Credit Karma as they continue to expand globally.”
Kenneth Lin, the co-founder of Credit Karma, launched the company due to the issues he had trying to to find out his own credit score. Lin bootstrapped Credit Karma with co-founders Ryan Graciano and Nichole Mustard for a couple of years before raising funding.
Now Credit Karma has more than 800 employees in the U.S. And there are more than 85 million people in America who use Credit Karma. Credit Karma generates revenue through commissions when users sign up for credit cards and loans.
Several months ago, Silver Lake bought a stake in Credit Karma at a $4 billion valuation. And Mustard told Forbes that Credit Karma is ready to take its success overseas. “We’ll aggressively scale our technology to provide many of our services that are so popular in the U.S. to our new members in the U.K., plus explore more products tailored to their financial needs,” said Mustard via Forbes.
Earlier this year, Credit Karma acquired a mortgage platform company called Approved. As a result of that acquisition, Credit Karma started working with banks to offer pre-approved loans.
Interestingly, credit agency company Experian also acquired a UK-based credit scoring app this year called Clear Score. This deal was valued at £275 million and Clear Score had 6 million registered users.
The terms of the Noddle deal were undisclosed. However, Credit Karma will absorb all 35 of Noddle’s employees.
