FinTech news in Centerbridge category

Showing that the regtech industry remains robust to economic headwinds, private equity firms Centerbridge Partners and Bridgeport Partners today announced plans to acquire the publicly-traded Computer Services, Inc. (CSI), a provider of payments processing and regulatory compliance services, for $1.6 billion in an all-cash deal. Centerbridge and Bridgeport note that the deal, if approved by shareholders and regulators as they expect in Q4 2022, will net CSI shareholders a 53% premium over CSI’s closing stock price as of August 19. CSI’s board unanimously approved the plan to take the company private; post-acquisition, its stock will no longer be listed on the public market. Throughout the 1980s, CSI built a network of data centers, began selling its first PC software, and developed what it claims was one of the first online ATM systems.

And when you consider all of the elements that go into buying and selling goods and services, there are a lot of areas left for SumUp to tackle — big data analytics, more tools to build, manage and optimize, online sales experiences for its customers, more technology to use to improve how items are sold in physical commerce experiences and so on — all areas that SumUp can approach either through building its own technology, or indeed through more M&A. The solution for a company like SumUp — with the bread and butter of its business, point of sale payments, fundamentally a part of that in-person commerce experience — has been to diversify and double down on a wider array of services for its small business retailers customers. Nevertheless, turning that statistic around, POS payments still represents the bulk of the company’s revenues, so 60% growth is not just a testament to SumUp being able to grow that business in the last two years, but also the fact that in-person and point-of-sale payments remained active areas for transactions. To that end, it has used significant chunks of the debt it’s raised to date for acquisitions and to build out more services beyond POS payments, in areas like business banking (the basic version of which it throws in as a freebie), online payments and business services around both.

Stenn — which applies big data analytics, taking a few datapoints about a business (the main two being what money it has coming in and going out based on invoices) and matching them up against an algorithm that takes some 1,000 other factors into account to determine its eligibility for a loan of up to $10 million; and on the other side taps a network of institutions and other big lenders to provide the capital for that financing — has raised $50 million in equity funding to expand its business after seeing accelerated growth.