FLEETCOR Grows Cross-Border Business with $675 Million Cambridge Buy
Less than two months after announcing a major joint venture in the gifting vertical, FLEETCOR Technologies has made a big move into the red-hot cross-border payments sector, reaching an agreement to acquire international B2B payments specialist Cambridge Global Payments for $675 million. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2017, subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions.
The deal marks entry into the cross-border B2B payments vertical for FLEETCOR, which has a major presence in the U.S. fuel and payroll cards business. Founded in 1992, Toronto-based Cambridge processes more than $20 billion in B2B cross-border payments annually. It also serves 13,000 client companies—mainly small and midsize businesses—that use Cambridge’s platform to make international payments to suppliers and employees via wire, EFT, draft and check payments in more than 140 currencies.
Cambridge’s footprint in international corporate payments is a good fit with FLEETCOR’s domestic payments focus and will enable the company to fill both needs for many of its clients, according to Ron Clarke, chairman and CEO, FLEETCOR. “Given that all of Cambridge’s customers have domestic [payments] to pay, we believe the acquisition will result in substantial synergies by integrating Comdata’s domestic accounts payable automation and virtual card solutions into Cambridge’s client base,” Clarke noted.
The move into cross-border corporate payments follows FLEETCOR’s decision to significantly expand its presence in gifting by combining its operations in that sector with First Data’s gifting business. Announced in March, the joint venture also expanded FLEETCOR’s existing offerings to include digital gifting. FLEETCOR entered the gifting arena with its acquisition of Stored Value Solutions (SVS), a gift card processing and program management specialist that became part of FLEETCOR when the company acquired SVS parent Comdata for $3.45 billion in 2014.
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