Why SoFi Is Buying Galileo Financial Technologies For $1.2 Billion

By Amit Chowdhry ● Apr 9, 2020
  • Online personal finance company SoFi announced it is acquiring financial services API and payments platform company Galileo

Online personal finance company SoFi announced it signed a definitive agreement to acquire financial services API and payments platform company Galileo Financial Technologies. SoFi will pay a total purchase consideration of $1.2 billion to acquire Galileo, comprised of cash and stock.

Galileo’s digital payments platform is known for enabling critical checking and savings account-like functionality via its powerful open APIs thus providing companies with an easy way to create sophisticated consumer and B2B financial services. And the company’s offerings are accessible via mobile, desktop, and a physical debit card. Galileo’s APIs power functionalities including account set-up, funding, direct deposit, ACH transfer, IVR, early paycheck direct deposit, bill pay, transaction notifications, check balance, and point of sale authorization as well as dozens of other capabilities.

Galileo processed over $53 billion of annualized payments volume in March 2020, up from $26 billion in September 2019. And SoFi Money is already tightly integrated with Galileo’s payment platform including several of its leading account and events API functionalities.

Galileo and SoFi are going to work together to accelerate the pace of technology innovation to offer Galileo’s partners and subsequently consumers everywhere, even more value. Plus these new functionalities and services will further help Galileo’s current and new partners capture the secular shift of financial transactions from the physical-only to a multi-channel digital and physical platform.

With the addition of Galileo, SoFi will strengthen its capabilities and round out its best-in-class technology ecosystem. And the combination will extend the reach of its products to other Galileo partners in the US and international markets while offering diversification and scale to SoFi’s existing infrastructure.

Galileo will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of Social Finance Inc. with Wilkes as CEO. And Galileo will collaborate with SoFi to accelerate the technology roadmap needs for consumer financial offerings as well as offering the full SoFi suite of products and services to those Galileo partners who are looking to broaden their offering to better meet the needs of their customers.

Key Quotes:

“SoFi has established itself as a leader in the fintech sector, providing our more than one million members a full array of financial products to help them get their money right. The response by our members to our innovation across borrowing, saving, spending, and investing has motivated us to think bigger, bolder and more expansively given the insatiable consumer appetite for financial services innovation. Together with Galileo, we will partner to build on our companies’ strengths to drive even greater financial technology innovation, making those products and services available to both current and future partners. While we march forward on our mission to help people achieve financial independence through our own direct efforts, with Galileo, we can enable a broader ecosystem of companies to join us in helping the world achieve financial independence.”

-SoFi CEO Anthony Noto

“SoFi has built a very strong diversified financial services company focusing on a full suite of financial services. These are products that many of our leading fintech clients are asking for. Distributing products through our enterprise class API is the vision behind this combination. I think it’s very powerful. We’re excited to work with SoFi to build on the services that have made Galileo the leading supplier of infrastructure services to leading financial, technology, and fintech companies. With the help of SoFi, we intend to continue to grow with and support all of our existing clients and the product roadmaps that they have defined.”

-Clay Wilkes, CEO of Galileo