Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 26 July 2018
PayU Acquires Israeli Payment Technology Provider, Zooz
PayU announces the acquisition of payments technology platform ZOOZ. The deal supports PayU’s ongoing expansion into high growth markets and targets the $994 billion opportunity in cross border payments.
The ZOOZ acquisition is for an undisclosed amount but brings PayU’s total sum of investments and acquisitions in global fintech to more than $350 million since it began a series of strategic moves across the globe in 2016 to open access to financial services.
The ZOOZ and PayU teams will work together to create the leading, global standard payments infrastructure of the future. As part of this vision they will build a comprehensive, modular, and highly flexible ‘Payment OS platform’ that can support evolving merchant and broader payment industry needs. The platform’s immediately expected features include fraud management and real time reporting or smart routing, to better aid global merchant growth.
The deal follows a successful partnership which, for the first time, gave PayU merchants such as Gett and Kiwi.com access to 2.3 billion new customers across high growth markets via the ZOOZ-designed PayU Hub platform. It leverages PayU’s payments infrastructure and ZOOZ’s state-of-the-art technology to open up access to new markets for merchants with global aspirations and sets a new standard for payments across borders.
Laurent le Moal, CEO of PayU, said: “PayU is one of the most active investors in the fintech space and we are always looking for opportunities to innovate and support our merchant clients to grow. Today’s announcement is a great illustration of this philosophy in action and we are pleased to be welcoming the ZOOZ team further into the PayU fold. By working together to create the first ‘Payment OS’ platform we will advance PayU’s mission to help build a world without financial borders”.
Oren Levy, co-founder and CEO of ZOOZ added: “After a year-long, productive partnership, our shared vision to create a new global standard in payments infrastructure is becoming a reality with PayU’s acquisition of ZOOZ. The unique contribution we bring to PayU is an advanced technological layer which not only helps merchants worldwide to upscale their operations and provide a better customer experience, but also offers analytics and optimization capabilities that equip them with unprecedented insights”.
Sageworks upgrades lending platform
Sageworks, a financial information company that offers lending, credit risk and portfolio risk solutions to banks and credit unions, announced the rollout of significant enhancements to the Sageworks Lending Solution for financial institutions to increase flexibility and customization.
Enhancements include the addition of personal lending capabilities to the solution historically best-suited for commercial loans, supporting institutions’ growth on another line of revenue.
Banks and credit unions using Sageworks Lending Solution will now have the ability to evaluate both business and personal loans in one online system. Loan officers will benefit from faster processing time for loans and from the unification of customer data, helping them effectively meet customer expectations while also maintaining credit quality. Oftentimes personal lending is a low-margin area of growth for an institution; streamlining and automating the loan process using Sageworks Personal Lending can help scale this concentration with a lower cost per loan while also meeting the needs of its customers.
Atos to acquire Syntel to enhance its digital business
Atos announces its financial results for the first half of 2018.
Thierry Breton, Chairman and CEO said: “During the first half of the year we confirmed a strong commercial dynamic consolidating our strategy to accompany our customers all along their digital transformation. By leveraging the strengths of all our Divisions in our Digital Transformation Factory, we signed very large transformation contracts translating in a strong book to bill ratio in each Division and 117% for the Group. The commercial activity was particularly high in North America in Q2 with a book to bill ratio at 190%. In the meantime we continued to closely monitor our operational efficiency, improving the Group profitability and increasing EPS by circa 8 %. In this context, we confirm all our objectives for 2018 towards our 2019 Ambition.
After the transformational acquisition of SIX Payment Services by Worldline to be closed this year-end, I am proud with the announcement of another strategic move for the Group with the project to acquire Syntel, a US leading company in digital services, listed on Nasdaq. It represents a major step in Business & Platform Solutions as it will significantly enhance the Division growth and profitability profile through an extended digital services offering, cutting-edge India based delivery platforms, as well as revenue and cost synergies.
GBST and Equiniti announce strategic partnership
GBST, provider of wealth administration software through its Composer platform, and Equiniti, the specialist administration and payment service provider, have formed a strategic partnership to provide best in class technology and outsourcing services to the market.
The two firms will work together to offer investment operations and platform technology to clients and prospective clients within the life and pensions and wealth management sectors. The partnership agreement follows the successful implementation and ongoing provision of services to joint client Retirement Advantage. Here Equiniti provides outsourced business solutions covering customer services, technology and change activity, including management of the underlying systems, while GBST provides the retirement platform for SIPPs and annuities, closely integrated into Retirement Advantage’s other technology and digital platforms.
