Acquisition Archives

M&A Monday: Best of Show Winner TipRanks Acquires The Fly; TreviPay Agrees to Buy Apruve

By David Penn Posted on January 9, 2023
Categories: Acquisition, Alumni News, Daily news, David's column, Mergers & Acquisitions, TipRanks, TreviPay

2023 is only a few days old but the merger and acquisition action in the fintech industry has already begun.

2022 featured a number of major fintech acquisitions – from Vista Equity Partners $8 billion purchase of tax compliance specialist Avalara to Technisys’ $1.1 billion acquisition of SoFi to Fiserv’s $650 million deal with Finxact. As the new year begins amid economic uncertainty and a technology industry that is contracting, will 2023 produce more deal-making activity in fintech or less?

With this question in mind, here’s a look at recent year-ending and year-beginning M&A activity from a pair of our Finovate alums: TipRanks and TreviPay.

We learned last week TipRanks had agreed to acquire real-time financial news digital provider, The Fly. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in New Jersey, The Fly is a leading digital publisher that offers a live-streaming subscription service featuring short form stories and content on publicly-traded companies.

“TipRanks is a natural home for The Fly,” company President Ron Etergino said. “Both companies strive to level the playing field for investors and TipRanks’ institutional-grade research tools and data will enhance The Fly’s financial news products.”

With its technology that provides market research tools to retail investors and traders, TipRanks took Finovate audiences by storm in its debut appearance in 2013. The New York-based company won Best of Show at both FinovateSpring in May of that year and again at FinovateFall in September.

More recently, the Tel Aviv, Israel and New York-based company launched a new solution that determined risk factors for publicly traded companies, as well as a tool that analyzes publicly traded companies’ online traffic. In 2021, the company raised $77 million in funding in a round led by Prytek. Last year, TipRanks introduced country-specific websites for Australia, Canada, and the U.K.

TipRanks’ acquisition of The Fly is designed to further the company’s mission of becoming a “one-stop-shop platform for the retail investor,” according to CEO Uri Gruenbaum. “We see a lot of synergy between our companies and are excited that we can expand our offerings to provide breaking news – one of the top requirements of our Enterprise customers and end users,” Gruenbaum said.

Subject to customary closing conditions, the transaction is expected to close in Q1 of this year.

Amid the flurry of year-ending news, one alumni acquisition we missed was TreviPay’s decision to acquire payments platform Apruve early last month. Headquartered in Overland, Kansas, and making its Finovate debut last September at FinovateFall, TreviPay supports B2B commerce with its payments and invoicing network designed to optimize transactions between buyers and sellers. The company’s acquisition of payment platform Apruve is designed to help complement and add to TreviPay’s current order-to-cash technology and merchant invoicing solutions.

“The acquisition of Apruve will accelerate our advancement in the technology manufacturing vertical and expand our geographic reach into key Asian markets,” TreviPay CEO Brandon Spear said.

Terms of the transaction have not been disclosed, but all Apruve employees will be retained post-acquisition. Apruve was TreviPay’s second acquisition of 2022, having purchased B2B invoice payments network company BATON Financial Services in February.

With 90,000 buyers and 80,000 seller locations around the world, TreviPay automates the order-to-cash process via omni-channel checkout options, localized B2B invoicing, managed receivables, and fraud and risk management. The company’s tailored payments and invoicing networks enable merchants and suppliers alike to develop more profitable and enduring trade relationships. TreviPay processes $7 billion in transaction volume across 32 countries and 19 different currencies.

Founded in 1980, TreviPay demoed its Small Business Supplier Network (SBSN) at FinovateFall 2022. The offering gives banks the ability to grow its small business product offerings by enabling them to tap into the small business B2B trade credit market.

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Betterment Embraces the Cryptocurrency Revolution with Makara Acquisition

By David Penn Posted on February 8, 2022
Categories: Acquisition, Alumni News, Betterment, Daily news

Investment platform Betterment will acquire cryptocurrency portfolio manager Makara. Terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition will enable Betterment to incorporate automated, personalized digital asset investing into its roboadvisory services.
Seattle, Washington-based Makara was founded in 2021 and has raised $2.1 million in seed funding.

Mr. Money Mustache may not like it. But the news that online investment platform Betterment has agreed to acquire cryptocurrency portfolio manager Makara is yet another sign that incumbent fintechs are playing a major role in helping crypto go mainstream.

“Crypto is here to stay and Betterment wants to live our promise of long-term diversification and to provide our customers with the best variety of assets in the marketplace,” Betterment CEO Sarah Levy explained. Levy praised the Makara acquisition as a unique opportunity to bring Betterment customers managed cryptocurrency portfolios “combined with the guidance and ease-of-use that have defined Betterment.”

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Makara was founded in 2021 by Jesse Proudman and Sadie Raney. The company is the first crypto-based roboadvisor to be registered with the SEC, and offers investment exposure to the cryptocurrency market that is both automated and personalized to the investor’s goals and preferences. Makara investors can select cryptocurrencies organized into thematic baskets – Bitcoin, Blue Chip, Decentralized Finance, Ethereum, Inflation Hedge, Metaverse, Universe, and Web 3.0 – that cover the wide (and growing) range of digital asset offerings.

Betterment leverages passive index-tracking and fixed income ETFs to offer goal-based investing strategies via both taxable and tax-advantaged accounts such traditional and Roth IRAs. The addition of Makara will enable the New York-based investment platform to give investors the ability to diversify their accounts without having to worry about selecting individual digital assets. The acquisition will also make it easier for Betterment’s financial advisor customers to offer cryptocurrency exposure to their clients without those advisors having to be experts in the digital asset arena.

The acquisition is expected to close later in Q1 of 2022. Makara’s team of experts and engineers will join the Betterment team at that point.

“We developed Makara to bring an easy and accessible long-term investing approach to cryptocurrencies,” Makara co-founder and CEO Jesse Proudman said. “Combining our crypto expertise with Betterment’s scale will accelerate the growth of the platform with both retail investors and financial advisors.”

Betterment made its Finovate debut in 2010, winning Best of Show for its online savings and investment platform. In the years since, the company has grown into one of the world’s leading digital investment advisors, with more than 700,000 customers and more than $33 billion in assets under management. Last fall, the company announced raising $160 million in funding – including a $60 million in Series F equity investment – earning the New York-based firm a valuation of $1.3 billion.

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Wealthfront Agrees to Acquisition by UBS

By David Penn Posted on January 27, 2022
Categories: Acquisition, Alumni News, Daily news, Mergers & Acquisitions, Wealthfront

In one of the first big fintech acquisitions of the year, Wealthfront has agreed to be acquired by global investment bank and financial services company UBS. Valued at $1.4 billion, the all-cash deal represents a premium of at least 2x on Wealthfront’s most recent private market valuations, and underscores UBS’s determination to attract younger, high net worth American investors.

In a blog post at the Wealthfront website, company CEO David Fortunato called the acquisition a “strategic partnership” that will enable Wealthfront to offer new services and give its customers access to “UBS’s industry-leading investing insights and research.” Fortunato praised UBS’s new CEO Ralph Hamers, who was appointed to the top spot in the fall of 2020, as a “digital native” who has put the digitization of the Swiss-based multinational firm at the top of his agenda. Fortunato noted that Wealthfront will continue to operate as a standalone business under its own brand after the acquisition.

“Rest assured that nothing will change with your account or the cost of our service,” Fortunato wrote to the company’s customers. “We will continue delivering great products and features to you, now at a much faster pace. And you’ll get access to even more research and insights that can empower you as an investor.”

Founded in 2008 – and making its Finovate debut as kaChing a year later – Wealthfront has grown into a leading online automated investing platform with $27 billion under management and more than 470,000 clients in the U.S. Earlier this month, the company announced a trio of updates to its Smart Beta service, a feature of the company’s U.S. Direct Indexing offering that helps investors optimize their allocations to individual stocks. Last fall, Wealthfront unveiled its Socially Responsible Portfolio, which leverages Modern Portfolio Theory to give investors the ability to put their money where their values are while still earning returns comparable to those available in its Classic Portfolio.

“Adding Wealthfront’s capabilities and client base to our global investment ecosystem will significantly boost our ability to grow our business in the U.S.” UBS’s Hamers said in a statement. “Wealthfront compliments our core business in the U.S. providing wealth management to high net worth and ultra high net worth investors through trusted relationships with financial advisors, and will enhance our long-term ambition to deliver a scalable, digital-led wealth management solution to affluent investors.”

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Currencycloud Valued at $963 Million On News of Visa Acquisition

By David Penn Posted on July 22, 2021
Categories: Acquisition, Alumni News, Currency Cloud, Daily news, Mergers & Acquisitions, VISA

Global payments platform Currencycloud is the latest fintech to catch the eye of Visa, which announced this week that it has agreed to acquire the London-based fintech in a deal that values the company at $963 million (GBP 700 million). The acquisition announcement noted that the pact builds on a partnership that extends back to 2019 and bolsters Visa’s foreign exchange capabilities, enabling them to better serve FIs, fintechs, and other partners, as well as help them explore new use cases and payment flows.

“At Currencycloud, we’ve always strived to deliver a better tomorrow for all, from the smallest start-up to the global multi-nationals,” Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven said. “Re-imagining how money flows around the global economy just got more exciting as we join Visa.” Laven added that bringing Currencycloud’s expertise in fintech to Visa’s network will “enable us to deliver greater customer value to the businesses moving money across borders.”

Currencycloud will continue to operate out of its London, U.K. headquarters and its current management team will remain intact.

The acquisition news comes just a few weeks after the Currencycloud announced a partnership with Global Processing Services (GPS) to expand access to cross-border payments. The collaboration will give fintechs the ability to enhance their current product offerings with products like multi-currency digital wallets and services like point-of-sale foreign exchange.

“For Fintechs, building a multi-currency solution requires a huge effort across multiple functional and regulatory domains,” Currencycloud co-founder and VP of Partnerships & Enterprise Stephen Lemon explained when the collaboration was announced in June. “By working with Currencycloud and GPS, fintechs can reduce the complexity involved and get to market much more quickly for a fraction of the cost of self-building, while vastly reducing ongoing operational risk and overhead.”

A Finovate alum for more than six years, Currencycloud most recently demonstrated its technology on the Finovate stage in 2018, where the company presented its Global Collections product. Since then, Currencycloud has grown into a platform whose APIs have enabled processing of more than $100 billion in transactions for companies ranging from neobanks to financial services corporations. Currencycloud currently supports nearly 500 bank and fintech customers, reaching more than 180 countries.

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NEC Acquires Avaloq in $2.2 Billion Deal

By David Penn Posted on October 5, 2020
Categories: Acquisition, Avaloq, Mergers & Acquisitions

After 35 years in operation, Swiss-based digital banking solution provider Avaloq has agreed to be acquired by Japan’s NEC Corporation. The deal, in which NEC will buy 100% of the company’s shares from existing shareholders, valued the Swiss firm at more than $2.2 billion (CHF 2.05 billion), is billed at enabling Avaloq to “accelerate” its “growth, global expansion, and value creation strategy.”

“With NEC, Avaloq found a perfect new home to continue our success story of serving our clients with solutions that make their lives simpler in an ever more complex world,” Avaloq CEO Jürg Hunziker said. Company founder and chairman Francisco Fernandez added that acquisition would help the company continue to “invest heavily in R&D,” and highlighted the two firms’ shared emphasis on the “caring about customers and people.”

The transaction is expected to be completed in April 2021. The company will continue to operate as its own entity, based in Zurich.

First introduced to our audiences at our developers conference, FinDEVr London, in 2017, Avaloq made its Finovate debut a year later at FinovateEurope with a demonstration of its goal-based, wealth management solution. The cloud-based microservice enables wealth managers to provide risk-optimized investment objectives for their clients, which helps ensure that the client and their investment preferences, concerns, and risk tolerance are at the center of the investment advisory experience.

With more than 150 clients in 30 countries and nearly $5 trillion (4.5 trillion CHF) in client assets managed using its software, Avaloq recently announced partnerships with Belgium’s Banque Degroof Petercam in October and integrated with Enterprise Bot, an conversational AI and automation solution provider, in September. Also that month, FintechNews Switzerland featured Avaloq Group Chief Product Officer Martin Greweldinger, author of a report on the need for wealth managers to “democratize” their offerings to a wider audience in order to survive and grow.

“This democratization requires wealth managers to deliver personalized advice at scale while addressing the specific needs of this new affluent clientele through a balance of industrialization, innovation, and individualization,” Greweldinger noted. Read more about Avaloq’s report.

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Kabbage Acquires Radius, Adding Insights into Millions of SMEs to its Platform

By David Penn Posted on September 3, 2019
Categories: Acquisition, Kabbage, Mergers & Acquisitions, Radius

Small business financing company Kabbage has made a purchase that will help it get to know the world of SMEs all the better. In a deal announced today, Kabbage will acquire small business intelligence firm, and fellow Finovate alum, Radius, adding insights from more than 20 million U.S. small businesses to its platform.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Upon the successful closing of the acquisition, Kabbage said in a statement that it will add “nearly 20 team members” from Radius to its offices in San Francisco, including Radius CEO Joel Carusone, to help support the integration of the two platforms and the two companies.

“Data has always been our competitive advantage, and Radius strengthens it by adding millions of new and verified small business insights to our platform,” Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein said. “These new technology and data-analysis capabilities further differentiate us from other SMB-focused fintech companies as we dramatically expand our product set and service platform to address the unique cash flow needs of small businesses.”

Expressing a “deep respect for Kabbage’s data-driven technology and focus,” Radius’ Carusone highlighted similarities between the two firms. “Our companies have complementary technical architectures and domain experience for decision making,” he said. “With Kabbage, we can build a more sophisticated analytics solution to identify, reach, and serve small businesses.”

San Francisco, California-based Radius was founded in 2009. The company demonstrated its platform at FinovateSpring 2014, showing how it leverages big data to gain insights into more than 27 million small and medium-sized businesses. This information helps FIs find the best customer segments, build efficient and accurate targeted lead lists, and measure the success of marketing campaigns.

Radius began 2019 with the launch of its Data for Good campaign to help the company’s employees and customers give back to their communities. This included credit-backs to the accounts of for-profit companies for any data used to support philanthropic causes. The campaign also featured service donations to nonprofits to enable them to use the Radius’ enterprise customer data platform to reach out to and potentially partner with small businesses.

In May, Radius unveiled a new data stewardship app designed to fix bad, siloed Salesforce data. The new solution enables enterprises to manage data across any Salesforce field based on unified, trusted data. “Existing tools enrich some external data,” Radius CEO Joel Carusone explained, “but what’s missing is an easy-to-use application coupled with a powerful platform that gives users access to data unified across all third-parties and their internal data sets.”

Atlanta, Georgia-based Kabbage made its first appearance on the Finovate stage in 2010, demoing its Kabbage Loan offering at FinovateSpring that year. The company most recently demoed its Kabbage Card, a part of the company’s Kabbage Everywhere product expansion, at FinovateSpring 2015.

Featured in June by CEO World in its look at fintechs that are helping fight for fair lending, Kabbage announced a partnership with online banking platform Azlo in May that would create a new entity, Mission Street Capital, to help small businesses get the financing they need to grow. Kabbage also announced in May that it was teaming up with the BTEA (Building Trades Employers’ Association) in a strategic alliance to help women and minority-owned business enterprise contractors to secure funding for their projects.

With $2.5 billion in funding, Kabbage includes SoftBank Capital, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and BlueRun Ventures among its investors. The company was founded in 2009.

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In Third Deal in Four Weeks, Nymbus Acquires Sharp BancSystems

By David Penn Posted on June 22, 2016
Categories: Acquisition, Mergers & Acquisitions, NYMBUS

At the beginning of the month, cloud-based core-processing platform developer NYMBUS announced that it had bought core data processing solutions provider, R.C. Olmstead. Two weeks later, NYMBUS was back in deal-making mode, acquiring credit union software maker KMR. Two acquisitions in three weeks is a pretty impressive pace. But who knew there was more to come?

Today we learn that NYMBUS has scooped up another company, this time purchasing fellow core-processing vendor, Sharp BancSystems (SBS). Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but Banking Technology reports that the deal is the largest for NYMBUS to date. Along with the company’s other recent acquisitions, NYMBUS now has $200 million in intellectual property driving “tried and tested” banking software for publicly traded FIs.

Chief Experience Officer Mario Garcia demonstrated NYMBUS at FinovateSpring 2016 in San Jose.

NYMBUS founder Alex Lopatine praised SBS as a “best-in-class” industry pioneer for nearly thirty years. Nevertheless recognizing that its back-end core system was in need of an expensive overhaul in 2014, SBS decided that a partnership strategy would be the best approach and began conversations with NYMBUS in 2015. Interestingly, NYMBUS hired former Sharp BancSystems CEO and president Scott Sharp as its Chief Operating Officer in February, a move that now clearly foreshadowed the acquisition.

“The functionality that allowed banks to be on the top-performance list for all these years is being developed in the NYMBUS core today,” Sharp said. “There are inherent efficiencies built into the single stack application approach with a modern user experience, and there won’t be anything that can touch us in side-by-side comparisons in the very near future,” he explained.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Miami Beach, Florida, NYMBUS demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2016. Before its furious June acquisition pace, NYMBUS made headlines with its partnership with Geezeo in February, and launched its credit union collaboration service organization, CUNYMBUS in March. Also in March, NYMBUS was featured in Let’s Talk Payments as part of a look at innovative banking software companies.

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Sparkroom Acquired by Digital Media Solutions

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on February 1, 2016
Categories: Acquisition, Sparkroom

Marketing analytics provider Sparkroom was acquired by performance marketing company Digital Media Solutions (DMS) today.

Sparkroom will merge with the DMS team and by combining forces, Sparkroom will expand into new verticals and will add a host of resources to its solutions:

Enrollment management
Operational consulting
Brand strategy and development
Creative services
Website development
Media planning and buying

Sparkroom will retain its autonomy and will continue to operate out of its Paramus, NJ and Toronto, ON locations. As a part of the transition, the company has brought on Marcelo Parravicini as its new CMO.

The Toronto-based company offers marketing services such as SEO, advertising, compliance monitoring, and more. The company also creates software to help companies in a range of industries to analyze marketing efforts and automate performance.

Sparkroom debuted Lead IQ at FinovateSpring 2008.

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TSYS to Acquire TransFirst for $2.35 Billion

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on January 27, 2016
Categories: Acquisition, TSYS

Georgia-based payment solutions company TSYS announced the purchase of merchant-solutions provider TransFirst. The $235 billion, all-cash transaction will offer TSYS access to TransFirst’s 235,000 U.S.-based SMB clients. The deal is expected to enhance the ecommerce and omnichannel offerings of TSYS—making it the sixth-largest U.S. acquirer based on net revenue—and will boost its SMB client base to upwards of 645,000 merchants.

TransFirst’s 1,000 U.S.-based employees will join the TSYS workforce of 10,500. Upon closing the transaction, Mark Pyke, senior EVP and president of the TSYS merchant segment, will vacate his six-year career at TSYS, and be replaced by John Shlonsky, TransFirst president and CEO.

In a video, Troy Woods, chairman, president and CEO of TSYS, discusses the transaction with Shlonsky:

The deal is expected to close next quarter.

TSYS last demoed at FinovateAsia 2013 in Singapore, where the company debuted Authorization Controls.

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Ciright One Purchases Stratos Card

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 22, 2015
Categories: Acquisition, Stratos

While we were reading yesterday’s news that Bluetooth-connected payment card startup Stratos had been forced to shut down because a recent round of funding fell through, another plan for the company’s future was in the works.

This morning we learned Stratos signed an agreement to sell to Ciright One; terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Stratos co-founder Thiago Olson told TechCrunch that Stratos will continue to function as normal and plans to reinstate customer support in the next few weeks.

The Stratos card consolidates payment and membership cards into a single card with a rewrite-able magstripe. Users select one of three buttons on the card to transact with their top three cards, and access additional cards by activating a Bluetooth connection between the card and their smartphone. At FinovateSpring 2015, Stratos debuted a Digital Card Issuance platform that digitizes the card-fulfillment system by enabling users to download and use a virtual credit card within minutes of being approved.

Pennsylvania-based Ciright One is an active acquirer of Finovate alums. The company purchased GoNow Technologies (FinovateSpring 2013 demo) in September 2015 and last week launched The One, a smart card similar to the Stratos card.

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FIS Closes SunGuard Acquisition to the Tune of $5.1 Billion

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 16, 2015
Categories: Acquisition, FIS

Fintech giant FIS Global (NYSE:FIS) closed a $5.1 billion deal to acquire software and technology services company, SunGuard.

The deal boots FIS to 55,000 employees and a combined revenue of $9.3 billion. As a part of the acquisition, the Florida-based company will repay SunGuard’s outstanding debt.

In a statement, FIS president and CEO Gary Norcross states:

This acquisition creates one of the broadest sets of technology assets and market expertise in the industry, and allows FIS to present new opportunities to our existing client base as well as to financial services markets that we have not historically served.

At FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose, FIS debuted Cardless Cash, a mobile app that enables users to retrieve cash from ATMs using their smartphones. The application protects cardholders from ATM skimmers and uses in-app biometric authentication. Check out the live demo video.

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Exit Stage Right: Trustev Sells to TransUnion for $44 Million

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 10, 2015
Categories: Acquisition, TransUnion, Trustev

Today, in a blog post titled, A New Chapter, Trustev announced it has been acquired by one of its investors, TransUnion (NYSE: TRU), which went public on the NYSE earlier this year.

Pat Phelan says the exit will “allow us to deeply integrate with TransUnion and put our collective, rich-data sets and advanced technology to work in spotting fraudulent transactions even better than we already do.”

The deal between the two companies, which have been partners since 2014, closed for $44 million. TechCrunch reports Trustev will see $21 million of the amount up front and $23 million more contingent on meeting certain targets.

TransUnion, one of the big-three U.S. credit bureaus, has recently been expanding into fraud and identity-management solutions. In a press release, TransUnion’s president and CEO Jim Peck said:

As fraud grows in volume and sophistication, TransUnion continues to invest in building our global capabilities to help companies manage their risk. Holistic information is a powerful tool to help our customers approve good transactions and prevent fraud, and Trustev’s innovative capabilities are at the forefront of technology in this increasingly critical field.

Trustev, a Cork, Ireland-based company with 15 employees spread across the globe, says its service will not change for current customers. All employees have committed to stay.

Trustev debuted its Retail Decision solution at FinovateEurope 2014 in London. The company’s Retail Decision offers brick-and-mortar retail locations real-time verification of customer identities at the point of sale. TransUnion Interactive, a consumer subsidiary of TransUnion, debuted ZenDough at FinovateSpring 2010.

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