Rapyd to acquire Valitor payments company for $100 million
Rapyd, the UK-based ‘fintech as a service’ company, has announced that it would be acquiring the Valitor payments platform for $100 million from the Arion Bank.
Valitor is an Iceland-based company that is also into payments solutions and facilitates card processing services for its merchants across Iceland, UK, and Ireland. This comes close on the heels of the consolidation of the payments industry in the Nordic countries with Vipps, MobilePay, and Pivo combining their services to form a single payments platform. This shows some increasing competition in the payments industry in Europe as companies begin to realize that the industry is going to have a big boom in the coming years and they would need to prepare themselves for the competition from large players and investors as well.
This is the second acquisition of the company after it had Korta, another payment card services platform based out of Iceland, last year.
Arik Shtilman, Rapyd co-founder and CEO, says: “Iceland has long distinguished itself as a cashless nation and an innovation hub, with extraordinary levels of talent and a developed payments ecosystem. We plan to continue to grow and invest in Iceland, making it our European Hub, and will support local merchants while increasing our reach across Europe so that we can provide payment solutions to any business committed to pursuing global success.”
Rapyd had raised $300 million in Series D funding in January and it has been using these funds to look for strong payment companies in the region that it can acquire as it would help to consolidate the industry as it gets ready to take on the competition. The company believes that these acquisitions would help it to streamline the payments and other processes across the different channels which it can then use to reduce the FX fees and bring in other savings and help drive its growth across the different regions of Europe.
The payments industry has seen a lot of churn during recent months. Though the industry has been up and about for over a decade now, it hasn’t been able to capture the imagination of a lot of users who have been reluctant to jump to online payment systems and wallets as they continued to be engrossed with the offline methods. But the pandemic has changed all that and has forced users to depend on online wallets and systems even for basic payment needs. Users have also taken to it now and with the new generation of users preferring online to offline, the industry is set for a boom.
