Fiserv sets sights on mobile payments tech vendor Monitise
Lee Cameron, Monitise: clients will be served well by Fiserv
US tech giant Fiserv has offered to buy Monitise, a UK-based mobile payments software and solutions provider.
The cash offer to acquire is at 2.90 pence per share – valuing Monitise at approximately £70 million.
The transaction is subject to certain conditions, including Monitise shareholder approval, and is anticipated to close in Q3 this year.
Jeffery Yabuki, Fiserv’s president and CEO, describes Monitise as “a global pioneer and innovator in digital banking” with “talented associates and advanced technologies”.
Monitise has operations in the UK/Europe, Turkey and the US. It has six business lines, with the newest one being FINkit – a cloud-based development platform and toolkit designed specifically for banks and financial services clients. FINkit is built on IBM’s Bluemix platform.
Click here to read more about Monitise’s operations, business lines, projects and customers.
Lee Cameron, CEO of Monitise, believes Fiserv is “well-positioned to carry this business forward” and that his company’s clients “will be served well by Fiserv”.
All’s well that ends well
Monitise went through a difficult few years, partly attributed to growing too big too fast.
By 2014, it had to write off £128.5 million in efforts to reshape its model. The cost-cutting exercise continued into 2015.
The vendor put itself up for sale in early 2015 but changed its mind a couple of months later, following a strategic review concluding that Monitise should remain independent.
The company’s share prices plummeted by as much as 80% and in mid-2015 one of the shareholders, Visa Europe, announced it was getting out.
There was a quick succession of CEOs at Monitise too and the departure of the CFO.
However, it started to turn its fortunes around in 2016, with a 45% reduction in operating costs, making a small profit in H2 2016 and appointing a new COO.
It also cut its workforce from 1,000 to 300 people and moved all major development and engineering offshore.
