Cross-Border Deals: Caution! Contents Are Hot

What do you get when you mix equal portions of golden opportunities with the strong desire to serve the cross-border consumer?

Lots of high value, and very strategic cross-border acquisitions.

The biggest newsmaker was, of course, Visa’s deal to buy its European counterpart, Visa Europe, in a $23 billion deal. This gives Visa the bona fides to lay claim to its position as the largest global payments network on the planet.

ACI Worldwide acquired eCommerce company PAY.ON in a hybrid stock and cash consideration of $200 million in order to layer cross-border eCommerce into its global financial services infrastructure. And, earlier in September, EVO Payments International acquired Citigroup’s Mexican merchant acquiring business for an undisclosed amount in an effort to expand the number of acquiring endpoints it could serve through its gateway.

Buoyant on investing environment, Worldpay made its debut on the London Stock Exchange as the U.K.’s largest IPO of the year at a market cap of £4.8 billion ($7.3 billion). Payments firm Adyen landed another round of financing, bringing its value up to $2.3 billion. Is this a move to build up a war chest to buy up companies?

The November PYMNTS X-Border Payments Optimization TrackerTM examines the driving forces behind these opportunities: a strong dollar, the lure of unventured yet burgeoning markets and the pent-up demand on the part of consumers to shop anywhere around the world at any time.

Making A Market

Transforming a region into a market comes with the onus of building the necessary infrastructure for it. Companies are continuously vying to make the exchange seamless, smooth and secure. Ecommerce Europe rolled out Trustmark, a protection standard for merchants and consumers engaging in cross-border transactions. Separately, IBM revved up its real-time payment processing with Financial Transaction Manager, allowing banks to converge their Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) payment operations to a single hub to improve and expedite transactions.

The November X-Border Payments Optimization Tracker Updates

In this issue, we also profile 54 global payment service providers, including four new additions to the Tracker: allpago, Coinify, Payvision and European Merchant Services. Within existing providers, we updated four players to reflect new offerings and solutions: Computop, BitPay, Ingenico and CardinalCommerce.

Download the tracker here.

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