• Nuvei has agreed to be acquired by Advent International, which plans to take Nuvei private in an all-cash deal valued at around $6.3 billion.
• Nuvei originally went public in 2020 and has a current market capitalization of $6.08 billion.
• The deal is expected to close in late 2024 or early 2025.

Payment acceptance technology provider Nuvei announced this week it has agreed to go private via an acquisition by private equity firm Advent International. The all-cash deal values Nuvei at around $6.3 billion.

Canada-based Nuvei offers global card acquiring services, alternative payment acceptance methods, crypto payments, fraud and risk management, analytics and more. The company offers serves businesses across a range of industries in more than 200 global markets, facilitating 150 currencies via 600 payment methods. Nuvei’s customers include large brands such as New Balance, Shein, and Microsoft.

“This transaction marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for Nuvei, and we are glad to partner with Advent to continue to deliver for our customers and employees and capitalize on the significant opportunities that this investment provides,” said Nuvei Chair and CEO Philip Fayer. “Our strategic initiatives have always focused on accelerating our customers revenue, driving innovation across our technology, and developing our people. Bringing in a partner with such extensive experience in the payments sector will continue to support our development.”

Fayer will continue to serve as Nuvei’s Chair and CEO and will lead business operations. The company’s current leadership team will also remain in place once the deal is closed.

Nuvei went public in 2020 and now has a market capitalization of $6.08 billion. The company anticipates that operating under Advent, which has been investing in the payments space since 1984, will offer it resources, operational and sector expertise, and the capacity for investment.

“Our deep expertise and experience in payments give us conviction in the opportunity to support Nuvei as it continues to scale from its base in Canada as a global player in the space,” said Advent Managing Director Bo Huang. “We look forward to collaborating closely with Nuvei to capitalize on emerging opportunities to help shape the future of the payments industry.”

The deal is expected to close in late 2024 or early 2025.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

• GoCardless has agreed to acquire Nuapay for an undisclosed amount.
• GoCardless anticipates the move will expand its availability, as well as help it launch new products for additional verticals, including payroll, financial services, utilities, insurance, gaming, and gambling.
• The agreement has not been finalized and is currently subject to regulatory approvals.

Bank-to-bank payments company GoCardless announced it has agreed to acquire Nuapay. The financial terms of the agreement, which is subject to regulatory approvals, have not been disclosed.

The Nuapay brand is owned by EML Payments, which was founded in 2003 and headquartered in Australia, where it trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker EML. EML Payments acquired Nuapay in 2021 for an undisclosed amount. Nuapay itself was originally founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Ireland. The company launched to leverage open banking to power account-to-account payments. In addition to pay-by-bank services, Nuapay also offers credit transfers, direct debits, verified payouts, and more.

“How the world pays and gets paid is being transformed, with account-to-account payments and open banking playing the central role in that shift. Building on that shared vision, this acquisition will result in a combined organization with deep domestic and international payments and open banking expertise plus the scale to harness these opportunities for our clients and partners,” said Nuapay Co-founder and CEO Brian Hanrahan.

GoCardless anticipates that acquiring Nuapay will expand the availability and influence of GoCardless’ services through partners and intermediaries, including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Payment Service Providers (PSPs). The company also expects the deal will strengthen GoCardless’ standing as a significant player in the payment industry, potentially increasing market share, enhancing its reputation, and improving its competitive advantage.

As for more concrete benefits, integrating Nuapay’s offering into GoCardless’ bank payment platform will help GoCardless launch new products for additional verticals. Some of the new use cases could include payroll, financial services, utilities, insurance, gaming, and gambling.

“Nuapay is an established account-to-account payment provider and open banking specialist with a blue chip customer base,” said GoCardless Co-founder and CEO Hiroki Takeuchi. “Its business is perfectly aligned to our growth strategy, and will accelerate our vision to become the world’s bank payment network.”

GoCardless, which describes itself as being “on the path to profitability,” has recently launched Embed, its white-label customer acquisition tool for PSPs, and has signed partner agreements with Plend, Bluefort, Moss, and others.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska

• Financial infrastructure platform Xalts is acquiring Contour Network.
• Xalts will leverage the purchase to create embedded solutions for trade and supply chain finance.
• Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Singapore-based financial infrastructure platform Xalts announced this week it is buying Contour Network with an aim to enhance global trade finance. Financial terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Contour Network was built in 2017 by a consortium of eight global banks to create an open trade finance network. Today, more than 22 banks and 100+ global businesses use Contour’s network for digital trade finance.

Xalts helps banks streamline global trade, receivables, and supply chain financing operations with tools that facilitate everything from origination to multiparty workflows. The company will leverage Contour’s processes and integrations to facilitate communication and transactions between businesses and financial institutions in its network. Once the deal is complete, Xalts will initially focus on creating solutions that banks, logistics companies, and fintechs can embed within their own applications for their business customers.

Xalts CEO Ashutosh Goel said the company aims to create a “Plaid for Trade.” He explained, “Our vision is to expand the scope of Contour’s network which is trusted by banks and corporates, and build it into a rail that enables businesses to access digital solutions for trade and supply chain finance offered by banks, fintechs and technology partners. Combining our platform with Contour’s Network will allow participants to develop and deploy customized solutions quickly.”

Xalts, which leverages the blockchain to help its clients build tokenization applications, was founded in 2022 and currently has a team of more than 50 employees spread across offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, India, the U.A.E., and U.K.

“Citi has long been a leader in driving innovation in financial services. We invested in Contour in 2020 and led the seed round for Xalts in 2022,” said Citi Ventures Director Everett Leonidas. “The combination of these two companies into one firm with an expanded vision and a great leadership team will accelerate innovation in global trade finance.”

With Xalts aiming to become the “Plaid for Trade,” the partnership opens up new potential for businesses to access digital solutions for trade and supply chain finance. This move, combined with the company’s use of the blockchain, offers the potential to create more accessible and efficient solutions to a wider range of businesses.

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• Ramp acquired procurement startup Venue.
• Venue will help Ramp improve its Procurement product with purchase orders that automatically sync up to accounting platforms, collaboration tools, and new approval workflows.
• Venue was founded in 2022. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Business finance automation platform Ramp announced it has acquired procurement startup Venue and that it has made improvements to its Procurement product automations. Terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Ramp expects the acquisition will help it expand beyond corporate cards as it tackles inefficiencies across more of the financial tech stack.

Venue was founded in 2022 to help businesses simplify how they review, approve, and manage the cost of vendor relationships. The company’s tool helps employees request what they need, while offering finance teams visibility into all vendor requests spending. A year after launch, Venue was supporting clients with 500 to 1,000 employees and had raised $1.2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Exponent Founders Capital, and Basecase Capital.

“With Venue, we built a frictionless purchasing experience for employees and empowered businesses to buy what they needed while staying in-policy,” said Venue CEO and Co-founder TK Kong. “We’re excited to bring our expertise to Ramp and together help enable more efficiency, productivity, and seamless decision-making for our customers.”

Along with today’s acquisition, Ramp is launching improvements to its Procurement product with support from the Venue team. The combined team will offer businesses more control over and insight into employee spend, speed up review cycles, and help organizations save costs on IT and software spending. Now available for businesses using Ramp Plus, the new features include:

• Integrates the contract review process into Ramp’s approval workflow.
• Dynamic intake forms that capture every purchase request in one place.
• Purchase orders that sync to accounting platforms and offer auto-code matched invoices.
• Collaboration tools that allow all parties to comment and tag team members within requests.
• An activity feed to track procurement processes and keep record of approvals and changes made to requests and purchase orders.
• Seat Intelligence to track who is using the software and ensure businesses are getting their money’s worth from their SaaS contracts.

Ramp’s accounts payable product currently processes over $10 billion in accounts payable volume each year. The company, which is best known for its corporate card and expense management tools, counts more than 15,000 business clients.

Photo by Ihsan Adityawarman

• Talus Pay has acquired home services fintech infrastructure company Jobox.ai and B2B payment solutions company Clarus Merchant Services.
• Combined, the new entity will process more than $9 billion for 22,000+ merchant customers annually.
• Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Texas-based Talus Pay announced two major purchases this week. The payments processing company has acquired home services fintech infrastructure company Jobox.ai and B2B payment solutions company Clarus Merchant Services. Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Combined with the two new companies, Talus Pay now processes more than $9 billion a year for its more than 22,000 merchant customers. The fintech expects the acquisitions will help it grow its client base within the home and facility services verticals.

“We are excited to welcome both Jobox and Clarus to the Talus Pay team,” said Talus Pay CEO Kim Fitzsimmons. “We have tremendous end-to-end technology infrastructure and sales and service platforms. Adding Jobox and Clarus gives us additional proprietary software and scale in complimentary business-to-business industry verticals.”

Jobox was founded in California in 2016 to offer job matching, scheduling, payments, customer communications, and inventory management technology to U.S. home services professionals. The company currently serves more than 5,000 home services professionals across 39 U.S. states. Talus Pay will leverage its direct and reseller channels to scale Jobox’s open-source architecture across more industries, including auto repair, beauty, hospitality, non-profit, and service retail, among others. 

“Jobox is a terrific tool for underserved home and facility services professionals to help them efficiently run their businesses and increase their bottom lines,” said Jobox Co-founder and CEO Shay Bloch. “By joining forces with Talus Pay, we can accelerate our market share in the home services end market while having the opportunity to accelerate entry into new market verticals.”

Maryland-based Clarus, which has been providing payment services since 1999, currently processes more than $2 billion in annual card volume each year for a wide range of businesses, credit unions, wholesale distribution groups, and building materials distribution companies. After the acquisition is finalized, Clarus will be able to offer its merchant clients new solutions from Talus Pay.

Logistically, Clarus President Eric Pottebaum will join Talus Pay’s leadership team, serving as general manager of its Clarus portfolio. Bloch has been named Talus Pay’s chief strategy officer and Jobox Kaushik Pendurthi, also from Jobox, has been named chief technology officer.

Talus Pay, which itself was acquired by private equity firm A&M Capital Partners in 2017, processes 67.8 million transactions on an annual basis via sales agents and its network of financial institutions, independent sales organizations, independent software vendors, and value-added resellers. 

Photo by Lech Naumovich on Unsplash