In a cash deal valued at $233 million ($304 million CAD), PayPal Holdings has agreed to acquire Canada’s TIO Networks. PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman praised the way the company’s combination of digital platform and physical, in person locations made billpay “simpler, faster, and more affordable” – particularly for the underbanked. Chairman and CEO of TIO Networks, Hamed Shahbazi (pictured), emphasized this point as well. “We founded TIO to make speed and access part of the bill payment experience for the underserved, and we believe that we have created affordable products to serve the needs of all customers,” Shahbazi said.

TIO Networks will continue to operate as a service within PayPal after the acquisition, which is still pending shareholder approval. The purchase price of the Vancouver, British Columbia-based company, which made its Finovate debut in 2012, represented a premium of more than 25% of its recent share price. PayPal anticipates completing the acquisition in the second half of 2017.

Among the strategic benefits of the acquisition, according to PayPal, is the addition of 14 million consumer bill pay accounts with an estimated 60 million transactions processed as of TIO’s fiscal 2016. In addition, TIO Networks:

• Processes more than $9 billion in bill payments a year
• Accepts payments at more than 70,000 locations nationally
• Provides access to more than 10,000 billers in network
• Serves a wide variety of verticals including:
  • financial services companies
  • wireless carriers
  • insurance companies
  • app developers
  • national and local retail chains
  • general loan providers

TIO Networks was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The company demonstrated TIO MobilePay at FinovateSpring 2012. Five-year revenue growth of 125% helped TIO Networks make Canada’s 2016 PROFIT 500 list last fall, and in May, the company rebranded its consumer-facing acquisition, Chargestmart from 2014, as TIO.com. One of the top two tech companies in the 2016 TSX Venture 50, TIO was named by the Canadian Innovation Exchange as one of Canada’s 20 “hottest most innovative” public tech companies.