Banking has turned its strategy around with payment businesses. If a few years ago financial institutions they saw business as a vein that exploit the activity of cards and POS, have now turned the helm to sell them or give entry to an industrial partner that allows promoting the development of the acquisition business.
CaixaBank It already has several agreements formalized in business segments such as POS and prepaid services. Sabadell is negotiating an agreement to sell the acquiring business to an industrial partner and bankinter studies the entry of a third party into the POS business. For his part, Unicaja For now, it retains its stake in the payments subsidiary and Santander Y BBVA They have decided to develop their own businesses.
According to sources familiar with the market, the means of payment deal with segments that require a lot of investment. In this context, while the two big banks can afford to develop their own business to create large payment platforms, the entities of a smaller size They have chosen to bring in a specialized industrial partner who can contribute their experience.
“These are businesses that are very capex-intensive, mainly in technology, which makes it possible to offer value-added services. It is difficult for medium-sized banks to achieve that differential added value with their own resources and that is why we are seeing that they decide to associate with other players with a larger scale and specialized in means of payment to develop it”, he explains. Borja Peñasresponsible partner in deal advice KPMG Financial Services.
Other financial sources explain that these are cyclical movements that usually occur in the sector and that now the trend in payment businesses is to outsource them. In this sense, the same sources recall that similar processes have recently been carried out in the businesses of fund managers or with depositories.
industrial partners
CaixaBank was the first bank to allow partners into its payment-related businesses. The Catalan entity owns 100% of CaixaBank Payments & Consumer, the subsidiary specializing in consumer finance and means of payment, from which other specialized subsidiaries hang. In this sense, CaixaBank has agreements with the giant Global Payments in two segments, the POS business (Comercia Global Payments, of which the entity owns 20%) and the prepaid products and services business (MoneyToPay, in which it controls the 49%).
Sabadell is finalizing an agreement with an industrial partner in an operation that will be between 300 and 400 million euros. Sabadell’s idea is to sell the business while maintaining the marketing and distribution of payment-related products, mainly credit and debit cards. The European giants Worldline and Nexi remain in the final bid. The bank hopes to complete the process before the end of the year.
For his part, bankinter has recently launched a process to study the entry of a partner into the POS business. It is a minority part of what the bank’s payment business is, but for which it seeks a boost through the association with a third party.
Unicaja has recently broken the agreement that Liberbank had with UniversalPay for the business of payments with cards and POS, for which reason it will take full control of the payment businesses. At the moment the entity’s intention is to operate the business on its own, but financial sources do not rule out the search for a partner later.
Instead, the banking giants BBVA Y Santander They have opted for the internal development of the business. Santander’s commitment is especially relevant through its PagoNxt platform, which seeks to position itself as one of the top ten firms in the sector, which is considered one of the jewels of the bank’s business for the coming years.
The big players in payment methods
Consolidation. Payment-related businesses have become an emerging segment that has emerged in the heat of digitization. These are very desirable businesses due to the boom experienced by electronic commerce and online money transfer operations. According to a Deloitte report, digital payment transactions are expected to grow 13% annually until 2026, reaching a volume of $11.3 trillion in that year.
American and European giants. The most important payment providers are in North America with giants such as Global Payments, Fiserv, Stripe or the well-known Visa and Mastercard. However, large groups have emerged in Europe that are growing through acquisitions. The French Worldline and the Italian Nexi are positioning themselves as the two major European consolidators of the payments business and in recent months have been leading the major operations in the sector. Both companies have been selected by the European Central Bank (together with CaixaBank, EPI and Amazon) to develop the prototype of the digital euro.
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