Eighteen years after its launch, merchant payout platform Hyperwallet is receiving a payout of its own, to the tune of $400 million. The California-based company sold to payments pioneer PayPal this week, marking PayPal’s fifth acquisition in the past two years and its 16th total.
Hyperwallet helps businesses with mass payouts for earnings, commissions, and royalties payments and is best known for supporting payments in the gig economy. Some of the company’s more notable clients include HomeAway, Tilr, and Scentsy. In a blog post, Hyperwallet CEO Brent Warrington said, “Combining forces with PayPal will not just enhance our payout solutions but enable us to provide an integrated suite of payment capabilities to ecommerce platforms and marketplaces almost anywhere in the world.”
PayPal already has a solid foothold in the mass payout market, serving players such as Uber, Airbnb, and eBay. However, the company notes the acquisition will help it provide PayPal and Braintree merchants with “a comprehensive payments solution, including Hyperwallet’s localized, multi-currency payment distribution capabilities in more than 200 markets with numerous disbursement options, including prepaid card, bank account, debit card, cash pickup, check, and PayPal.”
The deal is expected to close in Q4 of this year. After the acquisition is finalized, the Hyperwallet team will report to Braintree General Manager Juan Benitez.
Hyperwallet most recently presented at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, where Bill Crowley, Chief Product Officer, and Blair Olynyk, Software Architect, gave a presentation titled, Pay the Planet: Implementing Frictionless Global Payout Distribution. Earlier this spring, Hyperwallet teamed up with Lyric Financial to bring advance royalty payments to artists. Last December, the company opened its first Asia Pacific office in Australia and soon after began offering disbursements from Amazon’s Australia marketplace.
As part of the agreement Universum will leverage Risk Ident’s FRIDA, a self-learning anti-fraud technology. FRIDA automatically analyzes individual transactions to establish relationships between transactions and quickly identify fraudulent connections. Retailers’ fraud managers receive an overview of flagged transactions, marking potential fraudulent activities, within seconds.
Universum will also deploy Risk Ident’s DEVICE IDENT, device fingerprinting technology that analyzes consumers’ devices and identifies fraudulent correlations with their use in real time. Retailers integrate DEVICE IDENT into the checkout page on their website and can quickly take action when the system notifies them of potential fraudulent activity.
