Worldline, (Euronext: WLN) a European payments and transactional services firm announced on Tuesday it has formed a strategic partnership with SIX and will be acquiring SIX Payment Services, the payment services division of SIX, for €2.3 million (CHF 2,750 million).
According to Worldline, SIX Payment Services (SPS) is the payment services division of SIX delivering at scale, both commercial acquiring and financial processing services. The firm reported that SPS has also successfully executed numerous cross-border acquisitions in the past, within particular Paylife in Austria in 2013, Cetrel in Luxembourg in 2014 and in 2017 a subsidiary of VÖB-ZVD in Germany and Aduno, its competitor in Switzerland. Speaking about the partnership and acquisition, Romeo Lacher, Chairman of the Board of Directors of SIX, stated:
“In an environment that has recently excelled above all through consolidation, we are actively shaping this development so that going forward we can continue to be the central provider of payment services in the financial market infrastructure sector for our customers in the future. We are very happy that in Worldline we have found a well-known and strong international partner who will work with us to advance and further develop the payment business. This strategic partnership makes us Europe’s leading and largest provider in one go. In the future, in addition to the existing SIX Payment Services offering, our customers will also benefit from Worldline’s innovative solutions along the entire value chain of cashless payment transactions.”
Gilles Grapinet, Worldline CEO, then added:
“For Worldline, reinforced by the talents of our future managers and colleagues from Six Payment Services, this formidable industrial merger is a major strategic step forward. Together, we will beneficiate from reinforced industrial scale, numerous synergies and complementarities that will boost our development, our profitability and that will at the same time, enlarge significantly our offerings to our customers, strongly benefit to our shareholders while opening new professional development opportunities for our all our employees. Through this merger, our Company with its intact financial firepower and its unrivalled size in our continent, will be better positioned than ever to continue its strategic endeavor to build, in the heart of Europe, a new global leader of the payment industry.”