Mergers & Acquisitions

A topic dedicated to Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) not including the SPACs mergers.

A fresh M&A:

Visa buying Currencycloud at $962M valuation

Visa announced that it will acquire London-based Currencycloud, a global platform for banks and fintechs to provide cross-border payments, in a deal that values the company at ÂŁ700 million ($962 million).

Currencycloud’s cloud-based platform offers a set of APIs enabling banks and financial services providers to offer currency exchange services, including real-time notifications on foreign exchange transactions, multi-currency wallets, and virtual account management.

Founded in 2012, Currencycloud previously raised at least $160 million in known funding, per Crunchbase data. Visa was the lead investor in its last round, an $80 million Series E in January 2020.

Very interesting. “Currencycloud is the engine inside Revolut.” I see this as positive news for Visa.

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Other Currencycloud’s customers include: Starling Bank, Fidor Bank, Seedrs, Oanda.

It’s seems that Visa is long in the challenger banks and fintechs’ future.

Is this a backup acquisition because Plaid acquisition weren’t approved by the US regulators? (Although Currencycloud and Plaid offer different B2B API services.)

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Last month another US financial institution also come to the shopping in UK Fintech space and it was also a UK Fintech valued ÂŁ700 million (like Currencycloud):

UK-based robo-advisor Nutmeg has been acquired by JP Morgan Chase to form the basis of the bank’s digital wealth offering outside of the US.

The two companies had partnered in 2020 to launch a range of ETFs under the Smart Alpha name. Nutmeg will now be wholly owned by JP Morgan.

No financial details of the transaction were disclosed but Reuters has reported that the sale cost around £700 million (€819 million).

Nutmeg has assets under management of around ÂŁ3.5 billion and more than 140,000 clients.

See this is part the problem with the UK. Don’t sell out the :unicorn:, list them.

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It was mentioned from JPM earnings call Q&A section that they see Europe and specifically the UK as a place they are looking to expand less traditional side of things (read: new Fintech) away from their core US traditional banking/wealth management. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some more acquisitions from them.

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