Mercury Payments Systems to be bought by Vantiv for $1.65 billion
Kathleen Lavine, Denver Business Journal
Matt Taylor, CEO of Mercury Payment Systems. The Durango-based company has agreed to be bought by Vantiv, Inc.
Mercury[6] Payment Systems will be bought in a $1.65 billion deal that shelves the Durango-based payment technology company’s plan to go public in a stock offering.
A larger payments industry competitor — Vantiv[7] Inc., based in Cincinnati — is buying Mercury, making the 12-year-old Colorado company part of the third-largest payments processor in the U.S.
The deal is expected to close by June 30, pending regulatory approval.
Vantiv approached Mercury “with a very compelling offer” after Mercury was well into its IPO planning and its paperwork to go public had been filed[8], said Matt Taylor[9], CEO of Mercury Payment Systems.
“We’ve been competitors with Vantiv, and we have a lot of respect for them, for some time now,” Taylor said. And the idea of blending the companies made a lot of sense.
Mercury Payment Systems has worked with vendors selling point-of-sale systems to small- and medium-sized businesses, mostly retailers, and got its payment processing technologies integrated directly into the systems used by thousands of companies.
Vantiv (NYSE: VNTV) wanted a bigger part of the integrated payment technologies business because that's expected to grow to account for 30 percent of all payments processing by 2017, the companies said.
“The emergence of integrated payment technology at the point-of-sale delivers a differentiated merchant experience and creates a highly-efficient, cloud-based delivery model for customer acquisition and retention,” said Charles Drucker[10], president and CEO of Vantiv. “Bringing the companies together will dramatically enhance our distribution and technology capabilities to serve a number of large and growing industry verticals.”
Greg Avery covers tech, telecom, aerospace and bioscience for the Denver Business Journal and writes for the "TechFlash" blog. Phone: 303-803-9222.
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- ^ Charles Drucker (feeds.bizjournals.com)