Mergers & Acquisitions

Bazaarvoice Acquires AddStructure

Bazaarvoice Acquires AddStructure
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Bazaarvoice, Mergers & Acquisitions

Bazaarvoice, a startup that helps retailers find and reach consumers, has agreed to acquire Addstructure, a company that offers search and discovery apps for e-commerce merchants. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Addstructure’s platform, which leverages machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze customer sentiment and product reviews, helps consumers search for and discover products faster. The addition of this capability to Bazaarvoice’s offerings will strengthen consumer-generated content and bolster shopper profiles across its network. Among Addstructure’s clients are Target and Best Buy, which use the company’s technology to analyze online reviews and customer questions that influence purchase decisions.

AddStructure’s employees will join Bazaarvoice’s team. The new team members will work out of offices in New York City and Chicago, where AddStructure was founded.

In a press release, Gene Austin, CEO of Bazaarvoice said, “As consumer behavior continues to evolve, brands and retailers must keep pace with new shopping trends and technologies to deliver engaging and consumer-friendly shopping experiences.” He added that AddStructure’s NLP and machine learning capabilities are an “incredible addition” to the company’s portfolio.

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Bazaarvoice has offices in Chicago, London, Munich, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, and Sydney. The company debuted Bazaarvoice Conversations at FinovateSpring 2012. The Conversations solution allows brands to capture, moderate, analyze, and display customer word-of-mouth in digital and mobile experiences. In November of last year, Bazaarvoice agreed to be acquired by Marlin Equity Partners, which will acquire each share of outstanding common stock of Bazaarvoice in exchange for $5.50 for a total value of approximately $521 million.

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Temenos Agrees to $1.96 Billion Takeover of Fidessa Group

Temenos Agrees to $1.96 Billion Takeover of Fidessa Group
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, Temenos

Swiss banking software technology provider Temenos has agreed to buy its British competitor, Fidessa Group in a deal for $1.96 billion. The transaction, which is subject to conditions, approvals, and regulatory clearances, will close in the first half of 2018.

Andreas Andreades, the Executive Chairman of Temenos, said that under the new agreement, the two firms “will create a global leader across financial services software.” He added, “We truly believe that this powerful combination will accelerate both companies complementary growth strategies in banking and capital markets and will enable us to cross-sell into our existing client bases and capture a greater share of the IT and software spend of banks especially as they move to the cloud.”

With Fidessa under its roof, Temenos plans to increase revenue growth by:

  • Implementing its sales-focused model
  • Broadening Fidessa’s product to cover software solutions from the front to the back office
  • Continuing Fidessa’s strategy of providing software solutions across capital markets
  • Leveraging cross-selling opportunities

The deal is expected to expand Temenos’ relationship with Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks across the globe and deepen the company’s relationships and knowledge in the U.S. and Japan to grow its core banking business. At the same time, Fidessa will benefit from a larger client base. “We are convinced that our combined company will have a unique set of capabilities that when combined with our exceptional people will position us as a core strategic partner to large financial institutions globally looking to upgrade their systems for the digital age,” Andreades said.

Founded in 1993, Temenos debuted its Connect Mobile Banking application at FinovateEurope 2015 in London. Late last year, the company teamed up with Latin America’s largest banking group, Itaú Unibanco Holding. Temenos employs 4,600+ people, operating out of 64 offices. The company’s systems serve more than 2,000 clients in over 150 countries. Temenos has a market capitalization of more than $5 billion.

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Placecast Acquired by Ericsson’s Emodo

Placecast Acquired by Ericsson’s Emodo
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, Placecast

In a deal announced today, location-based marketing and loyalty company Placecast has been acquired by Emodo for an undisclosed amount.

Emodo is a Swedish networking and telecom company that helps telcos monetize their subscriber data. The company, which debuted just months ago in November, is an Ericsson-owned entity.

As part of today’s deal, San Francisco-based Placecast’s CEO Alistair Goodman will transition to the role of Emodo Chief Commercial Officer. Placecast’s 38 employees will join Emodo’s workforce of 27 at its headquarters in the same city.

In a blog post, Goodman said that the deal builds on the strengths of both companies. “Placecast brings its leading carrier-verified, location-based data solutions to an experienced Emodo team, backed by Ericsson’s reputation as a neutral, trusted partner for mobile operators, advertisers, and publishers,” he said. The two firms plan to complete the integration by the second quarter of this year.

Founded in 2005, Placecast offers location-based marketing and loyalty programs for mobile operators, payments companies and brands. The company maintains and scrubs location data from more than 400 million mobile user profiles, tens of millions of merchant records, IDs and addresses from around the globe. Placecast’s other location-based solutions include Mobile Data Management Platform, Mobile Demand-Side Platform, and Native Mobile Advertising, among others.

The company demoed Shop Alerts mobile wallet at FinovateSpring 2013, at the height of fintech’s mobile wallet boom. Last July, Placecast launched Location Verification, a solution that leverages data from U.S. carriers to confirm the location accuracy of mobile ads, audiences, and attribution to bring geolocation to the next level.

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ThreatMetrix Acquired by RELX, Becomes Part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions

ThreatMetrix Acquired by RELX, Becomes Part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, ThreatMetrix

It’s the end of an era for ThreatMetrix. The authentication and fraud prevention company has been acquired by RELX Group for $830 million (£580 million). The deal is expected to close in the first half of this year.

The California-based company will operate as part of RELX’s Risk & Business Analytics under the LexisNexis Risk Solutions brand. LexisNexis, which offers authentication solutions to fight fraud, has been one of ThreatMetrix’s long-standing partners. LexisNexis leverages ThreatMetrix’s device intelligence solutions in its Risk Defense Platform and is planning further integration of ThreatMetrix’s capabilities in device, email, and social intelligence.

ThreatMetrix President and CEO Reed Taussig said that the previous partnership exemplifies “strong synergies” between the two organizations. Taussig added, “The benefits our shared customers have realized from the integration of our respective products are unmatched in the industry…. by combining the strength of LexisNexis Risk Solutions and ThreatMetrix into a single business, our customers, partners, and employees will benefit with a unique and compelling market opportunity.”

Founded in 2005, ThreatMetrix analyzes connections among locations, devices, identity, and threat intelligence, and combines this information with behavioral analytics to identify high risk transactions in real time. The company is known for its Digital Identity Network that analyzes 100 million transactions per day across 35,000 websites from 5,000 customers. This digital identity repository encompasses 1.4 billion unique online identities from 4.5 billion devices in 185 countries.

The Digital Identity Network is likely one of the reasons RELX was enticed to make the acquisition. In fact, the $830 million RELX paid for ThreatMetrix is $593 million higher than Pitchbook’s valuation of ThreatMetrix after the company’s 2014 funding round.

ThreatMetrix launched its Digital Identity Graph, which leverages information from the Digital Identity Network, at FinovateAsia 2016. The Digital Identity Graph gathers information on billions of transactions collected from tens of thousands of websites to build a user’s digital identity by analyzing connections between the user, their locations, behaviors, and devices. At FinovateSpring 2017, the company’s CTO, Andreas Baumhof, and Sr. Director of Product Management, Dean Weinert, launched SmartAuthentication for banks with multiple authentication methods. Earlier this month, ThreatMetrix teamed up with GlobalOnePay to power its Sentinel Defend, a fraud detection and scoring engine that protects cross-border transactions.

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Flywire Acquires OnPlan Holdings

Flywire Acquires OnPlan Holdings
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Flywire, Mergers & Acquisitions

Global payment and receivables solutions company Flywire announced today it has acquired OnPlanU and OnPlan Health, both subsidiaries of OnPlan Holdings. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

OnPlan Health is a web portal and payment solution that offers providers an automated way to settle patient balances. OnPlanU is a student billing and payment solution that enables universities to automate account setup and payments and set up tailored payment schedules for students.

Flywire said that clients have been pushing the company to offer the ability to manage payments and receivables from a single platform. CEO Mike Massaro said that the acquisition “brings a tremendous amount of technical capability and domain expertise to address it. In a short period of time, [OnPlan has] built a very strong product.”

The acquisition not only furthers Flywire’s reach into the healthcare payments space, it also adds more depth to the company’s education payments offerings. Adding OnPlan’s capabilities makes Flywire’s solutions more holistic, covering a range of globally-available services, including:

  • Invoicing
  • Secure payment processing
  • Consumer engagement
  • Recurring payments
  • Automated payment plans
  • Payment tracking
  • Reconciliation
  • Past due payments

OnPlan’s CEO John Talaga and CTO David King will join Flywire’s leadership team, bringing their expertise in healthcare. Talaga will lead Flywire’s healthcare segment, while King will lead the company’s product and development teams focused on education and healthcare. The rest of the OnPlan team will merge into Flywire, working from OnPlan’s Chicago-based office.

Talaga said that Flywire and OnPlan solve “distinct, but related problems, both taking cost and friction out of the payment and receivables process.” He continued, “While we complement their platform in several important ways, Flywire offers OnPlan tremendous scale with supportive and engaged investors, capital for growth, access to new markets, and a global customer support infrastructure.”

Discussing the deal in a press release, managing director of Bain Capital and Flywire board member Matt Harris said, “Both firms share a culture that is all about how to make life better for their clients. That, combined with their complementary capabilities, makes this a perfect fit and will add tremendous value for their customers.”

Flywire, which originally launched as peerTransfer in 2011, facilitates international payments for healthcare, education, and business. The company is headquartered in Boston with operations in the U.K., China, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and Spain. The company’s platform processes billions of dollars in payments every year in over 120 different local currencies, connecting more than 1,400 businesses and universities with their customers.

At FinovateSpring 2011, the company presented its original tuition payment platform. Last August, Flywire expanded its operations to Japan and formed a partnership with Volvo to help international student lease vehicles. Flywire has raised a total of $43.2 million.

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Envestnet Finalizes Acquisition of FolioDynamix for $195 Million

Envestnet Finalizes Acquisition of FolioDynamix for $195 Million
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Envestnet, Mergers & Acquisitions

Wealth management intelligence solutions company Envestnet has finalized its acquisition of Actua Corp’s FolioDynamix, a wealth tech solutions company, this week.

The deal, which was first announced in September of last year, was closed for $195 million. The acquisition is expected to add complementary trading tools and brokerage business support to Envestnet’s existing suite of offerings.

Jud Bergman, Envestnet Chairman and CEO said, “This is the next important step in developing a financial wellness network that enables advisors and enterprises to improve their productivity and deliver better outcomes for their clients.”

The deal brings FolioDynamix clients access to Envestnet’s trading tools and commission and brokerage support, as well as integrated wealth management solutions. Joseph Mrak, Chairman and CEO of FolioDynamix said, “We are excited to see where this collaboration takes us and the wealth management industry as a whole.”

Founded in 1999 Envestnet |Yodlee recently won Best of Show for its demo of Financial Health Check at FinovateFall 2017. The new offering leverages consumer data to measure and score their financial health and offers personalized recommendations and tools to help them improve their well-being. In November, the Chicago-based company teamed up with Token to support PSD2 compliant payments in line with open banking regulations.

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TSYS to Acquire Cayan for $1.05 Billion

TSYS to Acquire Cayan for $1.05 Billion
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, TSYS

Payments service provider TSYS has boosted its portfolio this week. The Georgia-based company has agreed to acquire Cayan, a payment technology company, for $1.05 billion. TSYS expects the deal to modestly benefit its net revenue growth and adjusted earnings per share.

Cayan’s flagship platform, Genius, provides a scalable, unified commerce experience across channels. The company offers merchant acquiring services to 70,000+ companies and 100+ U.S.-based partners.

M. Troy Woods, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of TSYS, said that this acquisition “strategically complements” the goals TSYS has “to become a leading payment solutions provider to small and medium size businesses.” Woods continued, “The addition of Cayan’s unified commerce solutions puts us in a strong competitive position to jointly offer a broader set of value-add products and services to our partners and merchants.”

The acquisition has been approved by the TSYS Board of Directors and is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.

TSYS was founded in 1983 and has 11,500 employees across offices in 13 countries. Last year, the company processed 25.5 billion transactions, generating $4.2 billion in revenue. TSYS demoed its Spend Controls feature at FinovateEurope 2013 in London. Last week, the company extended its agreement with Capital One to continue providing processing services for the bank’s North American clients. This October, TSYS company expanded its ProPay merchant services to Australia and, earlier in the summer, teamed up with behavioral analytics company Featurespace to bolster its fraud prevention capabilities. TSYS is a publicly traded company (NYSE: TSS).

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Following J.P. Morgan Chase Acquisition, WePay to Power Payments for Volusion

Following J.P. Morgan Chase Acquisition, WePay to Power Payments for Volusion
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, WePay

Having finalized its acquisition of WePay today, JP Morgan Chase announced that it has already put the payments platform to work: powering commerce platform Volusion.

Since it was founded in 2009, WePay has been creating payment APIs and processing payments on behalf of small businesses. Earlier this fall, the company announced it would be acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase in a deal that was finalized today. While the terms of the deal were officially undisclosed, TechCrunch reported that Chase picked up WePay for $300 million (up to $400 million including retention bonuses and potential earn-outs).

Now that the acquisition is complete, WePay will continue to operate as a stand-alone entity and serve its 1,000 clients, including Freshbooks, Constant Contact, and GoFundMe. Under its new parent company, California-based WePay will continue to expand its client-base. The company’s CEO Bill Clerico will remain as head of the company, working alongside Chase Merchant Services CEO Matt Kane.

“We see exponential growth ahead of us as we combine our fintech products and culture with the global brand, scale, proficiencies, and distribution of Chase,” said Clerico. “We are headed into a massive expansion of our team, with particular focus on engineering and product management, and looking for a new headquarters in the Bay Area to accommodate our planned growth.”

As a part of this growth, WePay will power a new service from Volusion called Volusion Payments. The Austin-based ecommerce company serves 30,000 active SMB merchants with $28 billion in cumulative sales. In a statement, Kevin Sproles, Volusion’s founder and CEO, said that the new offering will allow Volusion to help its SMB clients “get up and running instantly, with next-day settlement, competitive rates, and all of their payment processing tightly integrated within the software they’ve already chosen for managing their online stores.”

WePay launched its Veda Risk API at FinovateSpring 2014. In 2015, the company was named to the Inc. 500 list as the 62nd fastest-growing private company in the U.S. In May 2016, WePay launched a white-label mobile card reader, and this March, WePay announced its merchant clients can now use Apple Pay and Google’s Android Pay.

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Jwaala Acquired by Alogent

Jwaala Acquired by Alogent
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Jwaala, Mergers & Acquisitions

 

U.S. firm Alogent has acquired a Texas-based digital banking tech vendor, Jwaala, for an undisclosed amount, reports Antony Peyton of Banking Technology (Finovate’s sister publication).

Alogent, which is based in the U.S. state of Georgia, said it will continue to support Jwaala’s collection of solutions, which will be marketed under the new name, Alogent Digital.

Dede Wakefield, Alogent CEO, described the acquisition as “the next major step forward in our mission to digitize and automate the financial services world”, with Jwaala’s platform bringing a “significant foundational set of capabilities”.

“We believe deeply in our unique approach to digital banking,” Jwaala founding partner and CTO Andrew Taylor added. “And we expect tremendous new growth opportunities as part of a company as agile, innovative, and dynamic as Alogent.”

As reported last year, U.S.-based banking software vendor, Jack Henry & Associates, shed its deposit automation business, Goldleaf Enterprise Payments (formerly Alogent Corporation).

The buyer was Battery Ventures, a US/Israeli venture capital and private equity firm. With that deal, the company regained its former name – Alogent.

In terms of Alogent’s current back office software, this focuses on electronically capturing, processing and analyzing check data and images, including those captured on mobile devices.

Its customers range from small community banks and startups to top tier banks, and it is the latter segment that will be the company’s key focus with the arrival of Battery Ventures.

Founded in 2006, Jwaala demonstrated its MoneyTracker PFM solution at FinovateSpring 2009. In August, the company announced that Alaska USA FCU with more than 625,000 members and more than $7 billion in assets would deploy Jwaala’s Ignite platform. The company began the year with news that United Nations FCU had picked Jwaala’s Ignite as its new digital banking platform.

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Actiance Acquired by K1 Capital Management

Actiance Acquired by K1 Capital Management
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Actiance, Mergers & Acquisitions

Communications compliance and analytics company Actiance has made its exit this week. The California-based company has been acquired by K1 Investment Management, an investment firm focused on acquisition-based growth opportunities.

K1 will join Actiance with its rival, Smarsh, which specializes on archiving compliance. The combined company will reach more than 6,500 financial services companies, including the top 15 global banks. Neil Malik, Managing Partner at K1, said, “This combination of capabilities from Actiance and Smarsh provides the industry with a means to get ahead – and stay ahead – of compliance trends, while introducing the latest communications technologies to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the modern enterprise.”

The service can be deployed in the cloud, dedicated, on-premise, and hybrid and will offer capture, compliance, archiving, and supervision support across a range of communication channels, including email, social media, mobile messaging, instant messaging/collaboration, encrypted chat and voice communications. K1 plans to enhance the service by investing in product capabilities, increasing flexibility in deployment options, accelerating expansion in Europe and developing a joint channel partner program.

Kailash Ambwani, CEO of Actiance said that the new combined entity is “incredibly well-positioned” to address the growing compliance needs of financial services firms. He added, “Together we will enhance our combined sales and distribution capabilities, offer our customers additional resources and services, and accelerate our product development.”

Founded in 1998, Actiance most recently demoed at FinovateFall 2012 where it showcased Socialite, an active social compliance tool. Last month, the company launched a Safe Landing program for continuous compliance and in August, Actiance introduced a compliance and archiving solution for WeChat and WhatsApp. Before today’s acquisition, the company had raised $43.6 million.

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Qumram Acquired By Digital Performance Management Firm, Dynatrace

Qumram Acquired By Digital Performance Management Firm, Dynatrace
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, Qumram

Digital performance management company Dynatrace has acquired Qumram, a digital interaction audit solutions provider, for an undisclosed amount, reports Antony Peyton of Banking Technology (Finovate’s sister publication).

With the addition of Qumram’s technology and intellectual property, Dynatrace said it will provide the ability to visually replay a user session within its existing platform. Qumram’s product will be re-engineered and will form part of an expanded digital experience analytics offering that will be announced early next year.

Patrick Barnert, Qumram CEO, praised Dynatrace as a clear compliment to Qumram’s  technology. “Dynatrace is unique in its ability to not only monitor highly complex digital ecosystems but see every user transaction. In addition, their AI-powered analytics is amazing, The technology fit is identical to what we believe at Qumram, where every user’s experience is captured, analyzed, and able to be replayed on demand.”

Dynatrace CEO, John Van Siclen, said via the deal it will offer “advanced behavioral analytics that will combine session replay with our unique artificial intelligence (AI) analytics capabilities”.

Dynatrace also plans to double Qumram’s existing engineering team in Barcelona in the coming year.

In a recent and separate development, Dynatrace is working with Rabobank “to monitor the real-time experience of every customer and user for all services” at the bank.

The project, says Dynatrace, “supports Rabobank’s vision to centralise and optimise company-wide application performance monitoring to future-proof customer experience”.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Qumram demonstrated its regtech platform at FinovateFall 2016. This fall, the company announced that it would provide fully-compliant, mobile-to-mobile WhatsApp and WeChat conversation recording. In April, Qumram earned recognition as Best RegTech Company in the 2017 FinTech Breakthrough Awards, and in March, the company won Growth Stage Startup of the Year at the Swiss FinTech Awards 2017.

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EFL Merges with Lenddo

EFL Merges with Lenddo
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Entrepreneurial Finance Lab, Mergers & Acquisitions

Psychometric credit scoring company Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) announced today it has merged with alternative credit score provider Lenddo. The two companies have joined forces to offer a suite of credit scoring and identity verification products.

Both companies share a mission of “providing financial inclusion for more than one billion new and underserved individuals across the globe.” The new, combined company’s products will be available in more than 20 emerging markets, enabling lenders in those markets to offer citizens access to financial products and tools. Because of limited financial data and credit history availability, access to financial products has been previously unavailable to this underserved group.

“This merger will allow us to apply the right data at the right time on a per client basis, allowing people to use their digital profiles and personality traits to increase their financial options. Financial institutions across emerging markets will be able to predict risk like never before through the combination of our data sources and innovative risk modeling techniques,” said Jared Miller, CEO of EFL.

Each company has facilitated more than 5 million credit assessments since launching– EFL in 2010 and Lenddo in 2011– and have individually helped more than 50 financial institutions to disburse more than $2 billion in credit to people with limited information. The combined company will serve individuals and small businesses by offering banks, telcos, retailers, microfinance institutions, and insurers access to global data as well as machine learning and risk modeling techniques. Borrowers have the ability to choose if and when lenders use their psychometric, social media, and mobile phone data to underwrite risk.

The two entities will operate independently at first and will announce further changes over the next few months. The companies anticipate a name change will “most likely” happen, and expect to announce a branding decision in early 2018. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The first joint product offering went live in Asia and Latin America yesterday. Additional products and features will be announced in the “coming months.”

Headquartered in Bermuda, EFL showcased its credit scoring tool at FinovateAsia 2012 in Singapore. Last year, the company teamed with FICO to enhance the company’s credit scoring methodology. EFL was recently nominated as a finalist in the 2017 MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge.

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