Sella Open Fintech Platform to buy Vipera for $34m
SOFP buys Vipera for $34m
Mobile financial services company Vipera is to be acquired by Sella Open Fintech Platform (SOFP), reports Julie Muhn at Finovate.
SOFP is the fintech arm of Gruppo Banca Sella, a family-owned banking and financial services group in Italy.
Talk of the acquisition first began on 22 March. This week, SOFP’s board of directors and Vipera directors Luciano Martucci and Martin Perrin have agreed upon a cash offer. The offer price of $0.11 per share values Vipera at just over $34 million, a premium of 20%. Commenting on the offer, which is subject to approvals, Martucci says: “Gruppo Banca Sella has been a valued customer of Vipera for some time and a shareholder since July 2017. I am pleased that our increasingly close relationship has led to our shareholders being offered a fair price and to Vipera’s businesses being able to develop as part of the SOFP Group.”
Vipera was founded in 2015 and went public in 2010. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker VIP. Headquartered in London, Vipera has 125 employees and three million registered users. Last July, Vipera acquired SoftTelecom for $1.5 million.
The company offers a range of personal and corporate banking systems, along with customer engagement analytics and marketing tools. Among them is Motif, a system that offers mobile banking, mobile payments, and mobile card control. The access to consumer data offers banks actionable insights that generate location and context-based mobile offers. The personalised offers are sent to the user’s phone at an appropriate time to enhance the shopping experience and build user engagement with their bank.
Most recently, Vipera teamed up with Mastercard to debut SME-pay, a mobile payment solution tailored for SMEs, which allows business owners to decide when, where, and how employees can use their business payment cards.
