Exits & Deep Reads

BioCatch gets acquired at a $1.3 billion valuation (TWIF 5/5)

Hello Fintech Friends,

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It was great to see an announcement at thisweekinfintech.com/community this week that two fintech founders who met in the community agreed to join forces by merging their companies. You can read the full story here. Hoping to see more of this!

Please find another week of fintech exits and deep reads below. (👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!)

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📖 Reads of the Week

☯️ Exits

This week, American Express CEO Stephen Squeri told journalists that the company – valued at $167 billion – doesn't have much appetite for mega-acquisitions, following questions about Capital One and Discover's $35 billion merger. This comes as the company sold off Accertify, the credit card anti-fraud technology provider it acquired in 2010 for around $150 million, to private equity firm Accel-KKR for a reported $800 million to $1 billion.

🤝 M&A - Fintech

Global private equity firm Permira will acquire Israeli fraud detection startup BioCatch for $1.3 billion. BioCatch reported over $100 million ARR in 2023, profitability, and 49% ARR growth. The company was founded in 2011.
FEMSA, the conglomerate behind Mexican megaretailer Oxxo, agreed with payment processing provider Conekta to purchase the assets used for operating its white-label payment solution, Oxxo Pay.
Business decision software Anaplan will acquire Fluence, a platform for financial close, consolidation, disclosure management and reporting.
Kredit Academy, a financial ed-tech platform that provides businesses with insight into new customer credit behavior, will acquire OctoCredit, a consumer credit improvement app.
Nayax, a commerce enablement, payments, and loyalty platform, acquired VMtecnologia, a technology provider for automated self-service in Brazil.
EMERAM, an investment firm specialising in medium-sized companies within German-speaking regions, will acquire CoCoNet, a provider of digital corporate banking software, particularly in payment transactions and cash management.
Mortgage Automator, a platform and ecosystem that serves asset-based lending from CRM, origination, execution, and servicing through reporting, legal, compliance, and accounting, announced a majority recapitalization by Bessemer's BVP Forge.
Epos Now, a British firm which provides retailers and hospitality businesses with payment processing tools and software, is exploring strategic options including a minority sale.

🏦 M&A - Bank and FinServ

Spanish bank BBVA submitted a merger proposal to its smaller rival Banco Sabadell, valuing it at about €12 billion. The combined bank would have over €1 trillion in assets.
Bahrain-based alternative investment fund Investcorp will acquire the digital technology services business of India's National Stock Exchange for $120 million.
A little over a year after the bank's initial sale, SVB Financial Group announced that a newly created entity from Pinegrove Capital Partners, Brookfield Asset Management, and Sequoia Heritage will acquire the company's venture investment arm, SVB Capital, for a combination of cash and other economic consideration.
As disclosed on Friday, GM is considering moving its $2 billion credit card business from Goldman Sachs to UK bank and issuer Barclays.
US regional bank UMB Financial is in talks to acquire its rival Heartland Financial, according to people with knowledge of the matter, in what would be the biggest US regional bank merger this year.
Rosemont, an investor in employee-owned asset and wealth management firms, made a minority investment in Northside Capital , an outsourced investment manager for ultra-high net worth families.

Wow.

The Visa/MC merchant settlement announced last month will be challenged … by er merchants (specifically the largest ones)

Pretty stunning that the NRF (major merchant advocacy group) was only informed of the settlement after the fact. Perhaps they didn’t want to engage… https://t.co/BJZVug122G
— Terry Angelos (@terryangelos) April 30, 2024

Chime has ~2x the number of active members (~30M) as the Ethereum ecosystem has in active addresses (~15M)

Yet we hear 100x more about ETH

Guess if Chime were public that might change. But interesting as always how human attention and incentive biases work pic.twitter.com/2bYUp1jzhw
— Bruno Werneck de Almeida (@brunoswerneck) May 1, 2024

A stablecoin reporting $4.5 billion in profits in Q1 with just a few dozen employees is a great illustration of how insanely profitable it can be to engage in regulatory arbitrage of the U.S.'s AML framework.
— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) May 1, 2024