European merchants payments provider Worldline announced plans to acquire payments gateway Digital River World Payments. As the following article reports, the combination will expand Worldline’s global coverage.
Worldline [Euronext: WLN], a European leader in the payments and transactional services industry, today announces it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 100 percent of the share capital of Digital River World Payments (DRWP), a leading online global payment service provider from Digital River, Inc., a leading global provider of Commerce-as-a-Service solutions.
Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, DRWP is a subsidiary of Digital River and employs approximately 120 employees worldwide. With global payment gateway, multi-acquiring and collecting services under one roof and having generated yearly gross revenue of c. 37 million euros in 2016, DRWP delivers comprehensive online payment acceptance and optimization solutions for leading enterprise brands, spanning a variety of industries, including travel, retail, direct selling and digital goods.
DRWP’s global platform and large geographical footprint support international payment schemes and currencies across 175 countries, a wide range of local payment brands and methods, and more than 40 acquiring bank connections.
Gilles Grapinet, Worldline CEO said “With the acquisition of DRWP, we are accelerating the execution of our strategy in Merchant Services and significantly increasing both our internet payment capabilities and our global reach to support international merchants and large retailers. Based on its current pipeline of diversified potential transactions, Worldline has the ambition to realize several other M&A operations normally before the end of the year and, in doing so, to expand across various new geographies in Continental Europe.”
The payments processing world continues to be all about volume, as well as gaining access to new markets more quickly via acquisition rather than organic growth. While it’s a crowded field, this expansion will focus on e-commerce and cross border transactions. Additionally, European-based Worldline gains access to U.S. merchant accounts.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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