A Special Master appointed by the Delaware District Court has recommended formal sanctions against both Envestnet and Yodlee, as part of a legal battle with FinancialApps LLC. FinancialApps claims trade secret misappropriation.
Bain Capital recently acquired Envestnet, and Yodlee was acquired by STG Partners.
According to a public statement, in December of 2024, Judge Jennifer L. Hall of the US District Court for the District of Delaware appointed Chad S.C. Stover as Special Master to provide a report and recommendation for the resolution of the parties’ competing motions.
On August 20, 2025, Stover’s report recommended that the District Court grant the portion of FinancialApps’ motion related to “the spoliation of Papertrail data, and deny Defendants’ motion entirely.”
Stover reportedly found that defendants intentionally took actions that caused the permanent deletion of data.
Stover was said to have found that “Defendants acted with an intent to deprive” FinancialApps of the Papertrail data, because “Defendants issued a document-hold notice covering the Papertrail ESI, then made the unilateral decision to contradict the hold notice and delete the Papertrail ESI, and cancelled the subscription that necessarily resulted in deletion of the Papertrail ESI a few days after FinancialApps filed its complaint.”
Kasowitz, LLP has pursued the case against Envestnet and Yodlee.
Envestnet is a wealth management platform. Yodlee is a data aggregation enabler in the open banking sector.
FinancialApps is a developer of financial applications.
