Visa eyes up Nets
Visa is reportedly considering buying parts of Nordic payment firm Nets, reports Jane Connolly.
According to Quartz, anonymous sources claim the card giant is one of the companies in talks with Nets about a possible acquisition, although only for certain elements of the business.
The sources say that Visa is interested in profitable segments such as bank-to-bank payments and automatic billing to bolster its digital payments offering.
Both Visa and Nets refused to comment on the story.
The deal would be the latest in a series of recent acquisitions for Visa, which has included POS payment gateway Payworks, cross-border payment company Earthport, chargebacks tech firm Verifi and token services and ticketing businesses from Rambus.
During a recent earnings call with analysts, Visa CEO Alfred Kelly notes: “We’ve gotten our act together as it relates to fintechs. We were a little bit slow out of the chute a year and a half ago, but over the last five quarters or so, we’ve been very, very focused on fintechs.”
Nets was taken private for $4.9 billion in 2017 by a consortium led by US private equity firm Hellman & Friedman.
Visa’s main rival, Mastercard, acquired direct bank account payments company VocaLink in 2016.
