If you follow UK tech news, fintech M&A shows up often enough that it's worth planning for as an engineering risk, not just a business one. A few recent examples make the pattern pretty clear.
The pattern shows up more than you'd think
When Visa acquired Plaid in a deal reported at $5.3 billion, the acquisition itself didn't break anything overnight, but it changed the trajectory of the product: enterprise first commercial terms became more prominent, and smaller teams increasingly found onboarding heavier than with leaner competitors.
TrueLayer's own migration from its Payments v2 API to v3 required developers to handle new mandatory request signing and restructure how pay-in creation and authorization were split into separate steps, a non-trivial integration change for anyone on the old version. And GoCardless's acquisition of the open banking provider Nordigen in 2022 came with a scaled-back free tier not long after, which pushed a chunk of smaller developers and indie fintechs to re-evaluate their stack entirely.
None of these are edge cases. If you build on a third-party payments API, at some point you are statistically likely to be on the losing end of an acquisition, a pricing change, or a forced migration.
