EML Payments Limited (ASX: EML) has acquired Sentential and its wholly-owned subsidiaries including open banking firm Nuapay. The binding agreement totals €110 million including an upfront enterprise value of €70 million plus an earn-out of up to €40 million.
Sentenial is a cloud-native payments company that is reportedly processing €45 billion per year. The Fintech is regulated in both the United Kingdom and France.
Nuapay is its open banking brand oeprating in the growing European open finance sector providing EML with the ability to manage payments across scheme (Mastercard and Visa) and non-scheme (A2A), as well as both card and non-card payments.
EML says it intends to expand Sentenial’s products into the North American and Australian markets. Following completion of the deal EML expects the combined group to become one of the largest Fintech enablers in open banking and prepaid sector. The deal is expected to close in late 2021.
Sean Fitzgerald, founder and CEO at Sentenial, said that Nuapay’s mission is to be the best way to pay and get paid.
“We are proud to have developed a market-leading Account-to-Account and open banking payments platform over nearly two decades in business. The revolution in payments caused by open banking and real-time payments is rapidly building momentum globally, and we are hugely excited by this opportunity to move to a global scale as part of EML. From the moment EML approached us, we’ve been impressed by their vision, ambition, and growing ecosystem.”
Tom Cregan, EML’s Managing Director and Group CEO, explained that his company has transitioned over the years from primarily a gift-card company to a company with a diverse revenue base across multiple prepaid products. The acquisition of Sentenial will be the next evolution for EML moving into a broader payments business by adding instant account-to-account payments into their suite of solutions for current and prospective customers.
“Sentenial operates an enterprise-grade payments platform processing over 45 billion Euro per annum, and is, therefore, a similar business to EML but servicing a different customer set with different payment types,” said Cregan. “The net result of bringing the companies together allows EML to increase our Total Addressable Market by expanding our product suite, and we see a number of opportunities to cross-sell Account to Account payments into existing EML customers, and vice versa. Sentenial is a European business today, and we will be working to extend its platform to our other regions in the coming 12-18 months.”