Intuit reportedly nears $7 billion deal to buy Credit Karma

Intuit is nearing a $7 billion deal to buy Credit Karma, a San Francisco-based provider of consumer credit-score checks and monitoring services, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Why it matters: The combined company would hold a staggering amount of personal financial information. For consumers, that means much better recommendations and much bigger privacy concerns.

• Credit Karma raised around $370 million in VC funding from firms like Ribbit Capital, Felicis Ventures, CapitalG, QED Investors, and Susquehanna Growth Equity. Silver Lake purchased a 12.5% stake from insiders in early 2018 at an estimated $4 billion valuation.

The bottom line: "Intuit could try to match all the tax data its TurboTax customers provide with the credit-scoring data that Credit Karma holds. That could let Intuit serve up better customer prospects to credit card issuers — and eventually let Intuit charge lenders more for access to its hoard of data, writes the New York Times.

Go deeper: What Intuit knows about you