Europe’s payments industry witnessed a drop of 27.8% in overall deal activity during the fourth quarter of 2019, when compared to the Q4 2018. This was found in the GlobalData’s deals database.
Details: A total of 26 deals worth $2.13billion were announced for the region during Q4 2019, against the last four-quarter when 36 deals were recorded.
Among all the deal types, venture financing saw the most activity in Q4 2019 with 12, representing a 46.2% share for the region.
In second place was M&A with 11 deals, followed by private equity deals with three transactions, respectively capturing a 42.3% and 11.5% share of the overall deal activity for the quarter.
In terms of the value of deals, M&A was the leading category in Europe’s payments industry with $1.93billion, while venture financing and private equity deals totalled $162.86million and $32.04million respectively.
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Top deals
The top five payments deals accounted for 96.4% of the overall value during Q4 2019. The combined value of the top five payments deals stood at $2.05bn, against the overall value of $2.13bn recorded for the quarter.
The top five payments industry deals of Q4 2019:
* Nexi’s $1.11billion asset transaction with Intesa Sanpaolo
* The $452.66m acquisition of Ebury Partners by Banco Santander
* EML Payments’ $358.84m acquisition of Prepaid Financial Services
* The $100m venture financing of CashDash by Coatue Management, Entree Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Oak HC/FT Partners, Stripes Group, Target Global and Tiger Global Management
* Toscafund Asset Management’s private equity deal with Lemon Way for $27.62m.
Note: GlobalData analysis only cover announced and completed deals from its financial deals database and excludes all terminated and rumoured deals. Country and industry are defined according to the headquarters and dominant industry of the target firm. The term ‘acquisition’ refers to both completed deals and those in the bidding stage.
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GlobalData tracks real-time data concerning all merger and acquisition, private equity/venture capital and asset transaction activity around the world from thousands of companies’ websites and other reliable sources.
