Santander reported that both volume and revenue growth at PagoNxt were the slowest since the business was formed in 2020. PagoNxt groups the bank’’s payment capabilities in single operating division but Santander has struggled a little to mould these businesses into a coherent whole.
The German merchant acquiring business and Superdigital, its Brazilian subprime unit were closed in Q3 at a total cost of €243m. Next to leave will be Ebury, although in happier circumstances. The UK-based trade finance specialist is set to float on the London market in early 2025 at a valuation of around €2bn.
This will leave PagoNxt with two divisions. The largest is Getnet, a merchant acquirer with strong positions aligned to Santander’s domestic banking network – Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico (where Getnet launched contactless ticketing on the Mexico City metro) and Argentina. Getnet is the number two acquirer in Latin America and will start selling in Chile shortly. The Latin American capabilities are now available to merchants through a single API connection called Getnet SEP (single entry point) which will be attractive to European merchants looking to simplify acceptance in this part of the world.
Total merchant payment volume at Getnet was up 7% in Q3 to €57.6bn with the strongest performance in Mexico, Spain and Portugal.. ATV was up 3% at €23.03.
PagoNxt Payments, sometimes known as Payments Hub, will be PagoNxt’s second operating unit. PagoNxt Payments groups all Santander’s A2A capabilities. The bank is steadily migrating its operating units onto the new platform and transaction volume is reported to be 5x greater than a year ago.
Total revenue across all today’s Pagonxt divisions – Getnet, PagoNxt Digital and Ebury – was up just 4% at €311m in Q3, the lowest growth since the division was founded four years ago. In better news, the proportion of business sourced from outside the Santander banking network has reached 24% year to date. This has grown from 14% in 2022 and is a key metric to help judge whether PagoNxt can prosper independently.
Expenses rose 15% year on year to €288m. Management believe technology spending has peaked and it’s now a question of driving down unit costs by driving up volume. There are early signs that the strategy is working. Cost per transaction processed, in constant currency, continues to fall and was down 7.5% YTD at 3.6c. This number includes acquiring and A2A.
Operating income, quite volatile from quarter to quarter, was down 52% at €23m in Q3 but flat year to date.
EBITDA margins were up 3.1pp to 23% YTD and management is confident of hitting its medium-term target of 30%. This seems achievable on the current trajectory, but management is also sticking to its 30% revenue growth target. This seems more ambitious – revenue was up just 12% YTD – and will present an early challenge to Juan Franco, the newly appointed PagoNxt CEO who joins from Nuvei.
Barclays is set to give away 80% of Barclaycard Payments, the UK’s second largest merchant acquirer, to Brookfield, a giant Canadian investment fund. In return, Brookfield will “bear the costs associated with growing the business.” This is a major U-turn from the British bank which had valued Barclaycard at $2.5bn as recently as last September.
Barclaycard must be in more of a mess than outsiders had realised. We knew the SME business was in freefall after Global Payments.bought Barclaycard’s best ISO but this deal suggests the corporate business is under huge pressure too.
Brookfield will be looking to emulate Bain and Advent’s stunning success in carving out Worldpay from RBS in 2010. The two PE funds leveraged their $1bn investment in Worldpay, into a $5bn return. The Canadians should be well prepared. Brookfield already has one large acquirer (Network International) on the books and Sir Ron Kalifa, the man who led Worldpay out of RBS, on the payroll.
Sir Ron and the team will have some easy costs to cut as many believe that Barclaycard employs twice as many people as it needs. And, with c.£300bn volume and 400,000 customers potentially moving into the joint-venture, there’s scope for growth. But the new owners will need to upgrade the product and replace ageing systems fast if they are to stem customer losses to Stripe, Adyen, Checkout and many others.
Dojo, a fast-growing London-HQ’d acquirer has also been taking large chunks out of Barclaycard’s SME customer base. Processed volume has grown from £10bn to £40bn in just three years. Dojo has reported its first operating profit although the bottom line is still weighed down by a mountain of debt. More details on the Business of Payments blog.
With UK growth slowing, successful international expansion is critical if Dojo is to outrun its creditors. For Spain, Dojo has hired a management team from EVO Payment and opened offices in Madrid and Barcelona. Dominated by banks, the Spanish market has long been seen as ripe for disruption by a focused, small business offer aimed at the hospitality trade. Italy is next in line for Dojo, having recently opened an office in Milan.
Worldline is in a mess. The stock price is down 90% and the CEO has been forced to resign after yet another profits warning. Management said the latest problems stemmed from “slow trading conditions”, the travel sector and “specific performance issues with the Pacific business.”
Figure 1 Worldline stock price
Some commentators argue that Worldline, valued at just €1.7bn, is ridiculously cheap for a business with €4.6bn annual sales and 20% EBITDA margins. The company has some protection against an opportunistic hostile takeover by the presence of both SIX and Credit Agricole as long-term shareholders.
The primary reason for Worldine’s evaporating valuation is management’s continued failure to meet its own modest targets accompanied with implausible explanations (such as blaming the weather) for the lack of growth. The CFTC union, which represents Worldline staff, has some well-argued commentary.
Nexi, Worldline’s arch-rival, is in better health. Q3 merchant revenues were up 7% on 13% higher payment volumes. Nexi has received a vote of confidence in the form of a €220m loan from the European Investment Bank to commercialise new business ideas from Nexi Digital, its R&D joint venture with Reply.
Competition is hotting up in Italy, Nexi’s home market, with the launch of Numia, the new name for BCC Pay. Numia is a joint-venture between a consortium of rural banks and FSI, the Milan based private equity group which has also invested in Bancomat, the Italian debit scheme. Numia claims €60bn processing volume from 200,000 POS terminals under management.
It’s often worth “buying” a big deal if it fundamentally shifts your market position. Adyen did just this in 2018 when it swiped eBay’s processing business from PayPal in return for granting eBay the right to buy four tranches of Adyen shares at €240 per share. The stock price is now €1400. eBay has exercised the second of four tranches of its Adyen warrants, netting a cool profit of €467m. For Adyen shareholders, the eBay deal is looking really expensive.
Unzer, the German PSP formerly owned by KKR, reported a €381m loss on sales of €200m in 2023. The bulk of the deficit was due to write-offs related to acquisitions and the company highlighted positive EBITDA of €27m. Unzer, which has 85,000 merchant customers, has spent €20m on beefing up compliance and has cleaned its customer portfolio of pornography and gambling. BAFIN has withdrawn a ban on signing new customers.
Klarna’s newly independent checkout business is relaunched as Kustom. The new brand claims to serve 24,000 merchants processing €13bn annually with the volume shortly to be moved to Stripe. Why Kustom? The new name “fundamentally reflects our desire to offer a high degree of customization for our merchants.” And it begins with K so the company is still KCO for short.
Kustom has competition. Qliro, listed on the Stockholm exchange, has raised €4m to help grow its sales to online merchants. The CEO believes Kustom merchants will be unsettled by the new ownership and consider changing suppliers. Qliro, which was spun out CDON, the Swedish eCommerce marketplace, processed €1bn in volume from 139 merchants last year and claims 5m user credentials.
On similar lines, Simpler a London-based business offering “checkout as a service” to eCommerce merchants, has raised €8m. Simpler says 1,000 merchants tap its database of 500.000 shoppers’ cards on file. The new investment will fund market expansion in UK, Italy and Spain. Simpler’s standard package offers one-click checkout for €63/month plus €0.2 + 1.1% for EU card payments. Bluesnap, the orchestration platform, is behind the scenes.
One-click is a major battleground with Apple/Google Pay, PayPal, Stripe and others fighting for the largest database of user credentials. Forrester warn that these options “compete with many other systems vying to auto populate data and automate checkout experiences,” and are likely to reduce conversion for one if five merchants. On the other hand, some commentators believe that organisations controlling checkout are best placed to build a western version of the wildly successful Asian superapps.
In other fundraising news, Acquired.com, which is a PSP not an acquirer, has raised £4m for product investment, notably for recurring payments.
Rezolve AI, Dan Wagner’s venture into conversational commerce, isn’t proving a good investment. Based in London but quoted on NASDAQ after reversing into a SPAC, Rezolve’s stock price has fallen from $11.36 at floatation in August to just $2.73 at the time of writing.
Figure 2 Rezolve AI stock price
Fiserv looks set to buy CCV, the Dutch-HQ’d POS infrastructure provider which is one of the few family businesses left in the payment sector. CCV has a strong European footprint in parking, EV charging and vending. Fiserv will be thinking of cross-selling payment processing to CCV’s 750,000 merchant locations but CCV’s capability will be useful to Fiserv and its bank partners too.
In other corporate activity, Access Group, an ISV roll-up financed by payment consolidation, has bought Qiksave, a mobile order and pay solution deployed in 8,000 locations worldwide and processing c.£3bn annually. Qiksave, which is loss making, has over 100 integrations with payment providers, POS software, loyalty/CRM solutions etc.
VR Payment, based in Frankfurt, has bought Wallee, a Swiss-based PSP with 80,000 terminals under management in the DACH region, Poland and Lithuania. Wallee also brings excellent automated boarding tools as well as integrations into eCommerce shopping carts. VR Payment is owned by the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken network and manages 286,000 terminals in Germany.
DNA Payments, a London-based acquirer/PSP owned by two Kazakh bankers, has denied reports that it would pay €50-60m for the merchant services business of Card Complete, Austria’s leading acquirer. In a statement, DNA said: “We can categorically state that DNA Payments is not acquiring Card Complete’s Merchant Services arm, nor is this something we are in discussions with them over.”
SumUp’s remarkable growth continues as the UK/German mPOS provider reported €1bn revenue in 2023. SumUp has cut costs, especially sales and marketing, to focus on “profitable growth” resulting in a maiden operating profit of €11m. This positive result was drowned by €148m interest payments on SumUp’s €1.2bn debt mountain. Undeterred, SumUp has raised an additional €285m funding and €1.5bn in loan finance and is reportedly hiring very aggressively once more.
Hardware
A combination of destocking following the pandemic’s supply chain whiplash and the recent tough retail trading environment has made life challenging for the terminal vendors. PAX reported sales down 15% in H1 2024. You can read more details on the Business of Payments blog.
Ingenico, owned by Apollo, the US private equity giant, has fared even worse with sales forecast to fall 33% this year. S&P has downgraded Ingenico’s credit rating and fears its “capital structure could become unstainable” if market conditions don’t improve.
Scheming
New research from Flagship shows the steady decline in Europe’s local card schemes with their market share in France, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Italy falling from c.80% in 2017 to 65%-75% today. Domestic schemes have suffered from being slow into eCommerce and late to insert themselves in the Google and Apple Pay wallets.
Dankort, the Danish debit scheme, is a good example. After years of enjoying quasi-monopolies both Dankort and Nets, Dankort’s sole acquirer, are under pressure.
Flatpay, which does not accept Dankort, is the main beneficiary, having reached 10% market share in Denmark with a Visa/Mastercard-only proposition. Nets, owned by Nexi, is not taking this well. Local press reports that it is bringing 17 small business customers to court for refusing to pay €270 “exit fees” to terminate their contracts.
European banks and regulators are concerned at the increasing reliance on US card brands. Wero, a QR-based mobile payment which uses SEPA Instant for settlement, is backed by Worldine, Nexi and a consortium of banks. Wero has launched in France and Germany with some lively commercials.
Wero’s French launch has clarified that the brand is pronounced Ouiro but that Vero (assumed to be the German way) will be tolerated.
Some of have questioned the logic of marketing Wero to consumers before it has built out its acceptance network. For example, Computop remains the only distributor to eCommerce merchants in Germany. And there are some teething troubles. Users have complained that they can only link their Wero account to a single bank account and that changing phones requires re-registration
Nevertheless, Wero stands a better chance of success than previous initiatives because it is built on existing products that bring a user base. The core technology comes from iDEAL and Wero will also incorporate Paylib, supported by BNP Paribas, Societe Genale and La Banque Postale. Paylib processed €6bn last year.
In Germany, Wero replaces the disastrous Giro Online/Paydirekt which processed just €1.6bn last year. But management will need to work hard to displace PayPal which dominates German eCommerce, accounting for 28% of online transactions.
Of course, Wero is not the only European mobile payment method challenging cards. Blik, owned by Mastercard and a consortium of Polish banks, reported volume up 36% in H1 2024 to €37bn and is expanding into both Slovakia (with Tatra Bank) and Romania.
The National Bank of Hungary has launched its own QR based payment product sitting on the national instant payments network. Kvik, is now accepted at 6,000 POS terminals and 15,000 online stores using OTP’s SimplePay product or Raifaissen for acceptance. 150.000 merchants are planned to be onboarded next year.
Meanwhile, the major schemes relentlessly grow their volume in Europe. Combined Visa and Mastercard payment volume was up 12% in Q3 24 in euros. Mastercard is still growing a little faster than its rival as portfolio migrations from NatWest, Deutsche Bank and UniCredit bring extra spending.
Banks will need to auto-register their cardholders. Even with a journey as smooth as this one at Deutsche Kredietbank, it’s going to be a challenge to get users to make the effort to sign up. However, Click to Pay should offer merchants higher conversion – the shopper won’t be challenged with 3DS) – at lower risk -the bank, not merchant is liable for fraud. But it’s complicated. This LinkedIn discussion between merchants and PSPs explains more.
Mastercard sees an opportunity to profit from a problem it created. The card giant has acquired Minna, a Swedish start-up that offers card holders the ability to turn off subscriptions from within their own banking app. This should be very popular.
Global Payments has bought several ISVs to gain distribution into key verticals. The strategy is now under review following the sale of AdvancedMD to Francisco Partners for $1.12bn. It’s not a fire sale. Global has made a profit, having bought the business for $700m in 2018. The cash will go on share buybacks. Global’s new CEO said of the retreat from healthcare software “”We recognize that global does not mean everywhere.”
ISV partnerships can be an effective way of distributing payment processing to small businesses, but software companies are not banks. They don’t sign long-term, exclusive agreements and can be fickle partners. Shopify, which processes $236bn with Stripe on behalf its Shopify Pay customers will now be sending volume to PayPal.
New research from PSE and TSG show Europe lagging behind the US in merchant adoption of embedded finance products, including payments. The researchers blame the local ISVs for not promoting payments strongly enough.
Adyen continues to win a series of high-profile ISV partnerships including Idosell, a Polish competitor to Shopify with 8,000 merchants and €3.5bn volume processed. These partnerships are increasingly brining larger merchants too. Adyen has signed Footasylum through its relationship with Newstore, the retailer’s software provider
A new report from Tidemark, a VC focused on vertical business software, lays out the case for ISVs to include payments as part of their core product offer. A good example is NOQ, a London-based start-up which offers business software and payments (from Adyen) to music festivals and sporting events. It just raised £3.4m.
New Shopping
Opinion remains divided on autonomous stores. Grabango, the automated checkout vendor used by Aldi, has closed down after running out of money. Grabango had raised a total of $93m. Aldi has shuttered its cashier-free supermarket in Utrecht saying “It was a fun experiment, and we learned a lot. But the investments are big.” Amazon has also been less enthusiastic of late, having closed three stores in New York saying “we couldn’t make the economics work”.
Undeterred, Sensei, a Portuguese start-up has just raised €15m to complement an initial €5.4m round in 2021. Metro, the German retail giant, is one of the investors and Sensei aims for 1,000 fully autonomous points of sale by 2026. Sensei has made a nice video that explains the proposition.
In France, Casino Group has started rolling out Cust2Mate carts from A2Z, an Israeli vendor, to its Franprix and Monoprix formats.
Kiosks are everywhere in quick service restaurants. Are they killing jobs? McDonalds say no. The kiosks are better at persuading customers to buy extras, and this creates additional work in the kitchen.
We’ve not heard much from the metaverse recently but Shopify merchants will soon be able to sell on Roblox. Expect “buy now” buttons linking you to real-world checkout pages.
Product
Revolut sees an opportunity to cross-sell payment acceptance to its 500,000 business customers. The bank just launched an in-house developed POS terminal available for sale at €169. Card processing is €0.02 + 0.8% at POS or 1% online. On-us transactions with Revolut Pay are just 0.5% and personal customers get loyalty points for choosing to pay direct from their bank account. This could be particularly be disruptive in Ireland where more than one third of the population has a Revolut account.
After its stunning success bundling checkout, processing and value-added services, Stripe has started unbundling. By the end of the year, Stripe Checkout will support 12 other processors including Worldpay. Stripe will become a processing option for FreedomPay’s enterprise merchants and has announced direct integrations with Oracle, Adobe and Cegid. This puts a clear strategic divide between Stripe, which is offering a series of modules, and Adyen which continues to insist customers take all its products.
One key reason for Stripe’s rapid evolution is that it’s been the payment provider of choice to the fastest growing businesses and has expanded with its customers. For example, Patrick Collinson, Stripe’s founder, says his business now serves 41 of the top 50 Gen AI web products.
Checkout.com is already unbundled and happy to process all or part of a merchant’s volume. Fintech and eCommerce merchants are the focus. It’s no longer much interested in crypto which, management says, represents under 4% of total volume.
At its annual customer conference in Barcelona, Checkout revealed the scale of its recent product launches including Flow, its one-click checkout service. Intelligent Acceptance, which optimises checkout flows, now runs more than 60m “optimisations” each day using AI “trained on billions of transaction data points.” Checkout now offers direct acquiring in Japan and will add Canada and Brazil in 2025.
Away from the global giants, Here’s a clever innovation from the City of Arhaus in Sweden, working with Tomra, Mastercard and Shift 4. It’s a reverse vending machine that pays you back €0.70 for returning each reusable coffee cup. “Why toss when you can tap?”
Merchant Cash Advance (MCA) has been around since the 90s but, rebranded as “embedded finance,” the product and taken a new lease of life. Merchants borrow short-term with repayments taken as a fixed proportion of each day’s card settlement payments. Lenders normally make distribution deals with payment providers – acquirers or ISOs – in return for commission payments.
Two of the European market leaders, Youlend and Liberis, are both based in London.
Youlend, controlled by EQT, grew revenues 75% to £118m year in the year to March 2024 with operating profits a very creditable £14m. Youlend has landed a number of big distribution deals including Dojo in the UK, through which Youlend has extended £1bn in loans to 20,000 businesses, Telecash in Germany and Deliverect in Spain.
Away from London, keep an eye on Flowpay, based in Czech Republic but expanding across central Europe. Flowpay, founded by the charismatic William Jalloul (read a good interview here) has locked down critical partnerships with local ISVs including Dotykačka, Shoptet and Storyous.
MCA has become much quicker and easer to access due to advances in credit scoring and the simpler integrations between lenders and Android payment terminals. Possibly too easy. This flow, demonstrated by MWBS, a UK based ISO on an Ingenico DX8000, is a great piece of customer experience. But borrowing money should be a considered purchase and this makes it too easy for a small business to get into debt.
Green payments
If we are to use less CO2, a good start will be for shoppers to understand how much greenhouse gas is generated by their purchases. Worldline is working with Stabiliti, a start-up based in London, to offer consumers the chance to offset their transactions.
Connect Earth, another UK start-up, is working with Tide, an SME bank, to show business users their CO2 statement alongside their financial one. I’m not sure there is a business opportunity here. Most likely the existing data providers such as Tapix will add CO2 estimates to their current product offers.
Calculating CO2 based on payment transaction data is a blunt instrument as is necessarily based on assumption about the carbon intensity of MCC codes.
As usage declines, the cost of cash acceptance increases, making more and more retailers likely to become cash free. This causes problems for a small number of people who either can’t or won’t use cash. I’ve sympathy with the former but not the latter.
The politicians are catching up. Norway has ruled that consumers should have the right to pay with cash up to 20,000NKR (€1700), a significant sum. It’s not clear how severe the penalties will be for refusing to follow the new law.
Let’s start with the positives. The UK open banking programme has passed a number of technical milestones and merchants are now getting real benefit from the technology. Just Giving, an online charity donation platform, which previously replied wholly on cards, now reports that 8-9% of donations are arriving by bank transfer. GoCardless is behind the scenes. JustGiving is not currently passing on the cost savings to its customers.
We’ve also seen a steady stream of new market entrants:
BlipPayments, built on Yapily’s aggregation APIs is aimed at the SME market with transactions at 80p each
Contiant, from Bulgaria and founded by emerchantpay alumni, claims to be cash positive after less than 12 month trading
However, many insiders are frustrated about the near-term future of open banking payments. The alphabet soup of regulators and competing industry groups making similar but slightly different proposals is confusing and leading to delay. Volker Schloenvoigt from Edgar Dunn explains the problems well in this blog post concluding that “too many (regulatory) cooks are spoiling the broth at the moment.”
Many in the industry are pinning their hopes on variable recurring payments (VRPs) which are the open banking equivalent of direct debits. Justin Hanna explains a fatal flaw. Unlike recurring card payments or standard direct debits, merchants cannot migrate VRPs from one vendor to another.
Some are looking to government for leadership, and I spoke to a number of MPs from the open banking panel at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool in September. We had a more lively discussion than the photograph suggests.
With Trump 2.0 looming across the Atlantic, the UK needs strategic autonomy in payments and open banking can provide this quickly.
But we need an acceptance mark, scheme rules (including consumer protection) and a consistent pricing model. Government could try to achieve this through one of its many regulatory bodies; a better idea would be for the UK banks to form a consortium and get on with it.
If domestic interests don’t show some leadership, the US card brands will fill the void and good luck to them. These folks know how to run payment schemes.
Visa’s new A2A product looks like the real deal. It includes both one-click open banking payments and consumer protection as Ciaran O’Malley explains. More importantly, Visa A2A has four banks on board at launch – Barclays, Nationwide, HSBC and Lloyds. Visa A2A debuts in the UK early next year with the Nordic markets following closely afterwards.
Elsewhere in Europe, the German banks won’t make much progress with open banking if the user journeys are as poor as these highlighted by Stefan Holscher. Transaction times of 45-90 seconds won’t draw shoppers from PayPal.
Worldline has finally launched its A2A product. If you’ve a SEPA bank account, you can try it out by making a donation to the Croix-Rouge Francais.
In corporate news, Vyne, has been acquired by Tarabut, the largest open banking vendor in the Middle East. Tarabut raised $32m last year. Vyne is supplying VRPs to Visa’s A2A product.
GoCardless has completed its acquisition of Senteniel from EML Payments. Senteniel, which includes Nuapay, an open banking vendor, grew revenue by 22% in year to June 2024 to €9.3m on €123bn processed volume. That’s a take rate of 1.2bps. Nobody is going to get rich selling direct debits.
Kevin, the well-funded Lithuanian open banking pioneer was hoping to make A2A transactions work at POS. The business went bankrupt in September having raised $65m. The founder blamed his investors, writing Kevin failed “due to the lack of courage and support from shareholders.”
In a new report, Flagship Consulting reveal that two thirds of payment providers in Europe and North America already offer SoftPOS. As volumes increase, the consultants believe it will cannibalise mPOS sales rather than traditional terminals.
I’m not so sure. I’m seeing many good enterprise use cases with kiosks and ECR systems and 71% of merchants in this research said they thought SoftPOS would ultimately replace the usual POS terminal.
In vendor news, Rubean, the Munich-based SoftPOS leader met market expectations with its Q3 results. A new deal with Deichmann, the German shoe retailer, boosted Q3 numbers and sales in 2024 have more than doubled to €1.3m. Rubean has >50K softPOS terminals live in Germany and Spain.
Banks have been losing share in SME payments but SoftPOS, embedded in an app that SMEs check several times a day, will be a good way to fight back.
Tide, a neo bank focused on small businesses, has included SoftPOS in its standard offer. I’m a customer and was able to register and start taking payments from my wife as a test after just a few clicks. Adyen is behind the scenes and the onboarding was impressive. On the downside, Tide offers net settlement (ie, it deducts the fees from each transaction) which is confusing and makes reconciliation a pain. And refunds are far from straightforward. But it’s early days and the service will improve quickly.
Just when you thought that the madness was behind us, Trump and the crypto bros are back in town. Expect a global scale Ponzi scheme backed by the government of the world’s largest economy and promoted daily by Elon on X. Already, the FT reports that 71% of crypto trades are derivatives. This won’t end well.
Shift4 will start offering crypto acceptance, partnering with Mesh. The first customers are a Las Vegas restaurant and a business offering helicopter tours of major cities. Jared Isaacman, Shift4’s CEO, paid $200m to Elon Musk to become the first businessman in space putting Shift4 in pole position to become Trump’s payment provider of choice.
Meanwhile, BAFIN, the German regulator, has shut down 47 cryptocurrency exchanges and confiscated 13 crypto ATMs in a long awaited anti money laundering crackdown. Criminals reportedly used these exchanges to conceal the origins of illicit funds, often obtained through dark web drug sales or ransomware attacks.
Some are developing solutions for merchants to accept crypto at POS. Musquet, based in London, has raised £750K to launch Bitcoin acceptance on a PAX A920. It claims a world-first. Bitcoin transactions are priced at 1%. Credit cards, processed via Raypd, are 0.9% + 5p.
This is an interesting proposition but not unique. Done4You, an ISO based in Namur, Belgium, has implemented crypto at POS for a petrol station in Luxembourg using GoCrypto’s technology. Crypto transactions are 1.25% compared to interchange + 0.5% for credit cards. NAKA, from Slovenia, is working on similar lines.
Stablecoins are less glamorous than Bitcoin but are beginning to have real world applications, especially in cross-border money transfer. Stablecoins are meant to track US dollars 1:1 but there’s always a worry that something might go wrong. The WSJ reported that Tether, the largest stablecoin, was under investigation for possible AML violations. Tether has denied this.
Stripe has paid $1.1bn to acquire Bridge, the largest stablecoin platform, with a view to providing remittance services to its worldwide merchant base. How excited should we be about Stablecoins and remittances? The CEO of Wise, who should know something about international money transfer, seemed unexcited in this answer on a recent results call.
Cashless Poland has been a stunning success in helping small businesses move to digital payments and it’s not over yet. There’s a new campaign featuring Szymon Majewski, a major celebrity in his home country.
And finally
Jas Shah has written an entertaining history of PayPal. It’s quite a story and far from over. Paypal has its mojo back including launching the best payments commercial in years. Enjoy Will Ferrell.
Truelayer, the leading open banking payments provider, is finally beginning to grow its revenues but, despite cost-cutting, the business remains a long way from profitability.
Reporting results for 2023, Truelayer says that payment volume doubled to £21bn and had reached an annualised £25.5bn by the end of the year. Momentum is growing and the company’s website now claims annualised volume of £29bn from 120m transactions. Truelayer’s multiple partnerships and blue chip customer relationships are beginning to deliver.
Truelayer describes itself as “Europe’s leading open banking payments network” but has dropped a previous claim of market leadership in four European countries. Instead, it reports “significant market share” in UK, Ireland, Spain, France, Germany and Netherlands.
The London-based fintech is investing at pace to establish leadership in the crowded market for open banking payments. Along with its competitors – Tink, Token, Volt, Yapily etc – Truelayer aggregates connections to thousands of banks into a single API. This allows merchants to offer consumers the option to pay from almost any bank through a single connection with Truelayer. Capability now extends to pay-outs and customer onboarding too.
Customers include Coinbase, Revolut and William Hill. Truelayer has some good case studies. For example, lastminute.com found that offering openbanking payments grew average order value by 20% and was a helpful resilience tool during the Crowdstrike outage.
Revenue tripled to £12.43m in 2023 but Truelayer is having to work hard for the money. Open banking transactions, at least for high-ticket items, are much cheaper than cards. Truelayer’s take rate is just 5bps which compares to 30-90bps for a traditional merchant acquirer. However, most open banking deals are believed to be priced per transaction. By this measure, Truelayer’s average of c.12p is reasonable but you still need to sell a lot of transactions at this price to justify a unicorn’s valuation.
Simoneschi understands this. Speaking in June, he told journalists that “scale is everything…. We are an infrastructure business. That means we are likely going to spend a lot of time and a lot of years building and spending money before actually earning.”
Cost of sales rose fourfold to £4.64 with gross margins falling 7ppt to 63%.
With Fintech investors less generous than of late, management has kept an eye on costs. Total employee expenses were down 7% at £43m. One third of engineering and product staff were laid off and total staff numbers fell from 434 to 346. But Truelayer kept on selling. Client care and sales numbers rose slightly.
Overall, administrative expenses were 4% lower at £62m.
Despite the reduction in development resource, Truelayer has been busy launching new products.
Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) is widely expected to transform the openbanking payment market by offering a modern replacement for direct debits. Truelayer says it is now processing 1m VRPs each month.
Management is also very pleased with progress from Signup+ which combines account set-up with making the first payment in a single action. And Truelayer has launched Payment Links which allows merchants to send an openbanking payment request via a text or email.
The payout product is also growing quickly, notably in Belgium, France, Netherlands and Portugal.
With a fast growing number of transactions flowing over a steady cost base, the operating loss narrowed a little to £54m from £61m in 2022. Accumulated losses now stand at £198m. With £51m cash in the bank at the end of 2023, Truelayer has another 12 months to become cash positive or will need to take additional capital.
Management is pleased with the 2023 results, saying “overall this was a significant year for the company and has laid strong foundations for continued growth and success in 2024”.
If shoppers do shift quickly from cards to open banking, the prize for API aggregators such as Truelayer could be significant. Transaction volumes are finally beginning to grow but competition between the specialist open banking vendors is reported to be ferocious. Consolidation is inevitable. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen GoCardless buy Nuapay and Paypoint acquire OB Connect. And Kevin, a well-funded Lithuanian open banking competitor couldn’t find a buyer and is now in liquidation.
The future is likely to favour open banking vendors with wealthy and committed backers. Truelayer should be one of winners but there is a long road still ahead.
Paymentsense, parent company of the Dojo brand which has taken the UK market by storm, has reported its first operating profit and refinanced its debt mountain with a new facility which does not expire until 2030.
Paymentsense is the brainchild of two low-profile serial entrepreneurs – Juan Farrarons and George Karibian. The duo intend to keep their foot on the gas, saying “the investors in the business continue to prioritise long term growth over short term profit.”
According to documents filed at Companies House by Typhoon Noteco, the ultimate UK holding company of Paymentsense and Dojo, payment volume for the year to March 2024 rose 29% to £43bn, continuing the astonishing growth witnessed since 2021. The number of transactions processed was up 32% at 2.2bn with ATV falling 2% to £19.24. This mirrors a consistent trend across the market as low ticket transactions continue to move from cash to cards.
Revenue rose 37% to £409m. The overall take rate increased 6bps to 0.96% and revenue per transaction was up 3% at 9.8p.
Paymentsense cleverly built the Dojo brand around the PAX A920. Other providers can re-sell PAX devices but only Paymentsense sells Dojo. In just a few years, the eye-catching white terminals have become ubiquitous on Britain’s high streets. Initially, known for its keen pricing and generous contract-buyouts, Dojo has begun to increase prices and the service, based on a branded PAX A920, is no longer cheap. Standard pricing is £30/month for a terminal (rental + “platform fee”) + 5p per transaction + 0.75% debit or 1.2% credit for processing.
Dojo has made a push into integrated payments in partnership with software vendors (ISVs) and claims 400 ePOS partners. This brings a better quality of merchant – higher transaction volumes and less likely to churn. And the customers seem happy. In this case study, a small restaurant chain reduced till discrepancies by 90%, saving 10 hours of admin per week.
The combination of price increases and ISV distribution is making Dojo’s underlying metrics look very good indeed. Although Dojo only grew customer locations by 3% to 150K, volume per location was up 25% at £284K and revenue per location up 34% at £2,700.
Total gross profit rose 36% to £218m.
In advance of the refinancing, management took steps to reduce costs saying that the business has “undergone a restructuring process…. streamlining various business units, optimising the organisational hierarchy and reallocating resources to key growth areas.”
30% of the sales team was axed although with additional recruitment in back-office functions total staff numbers rose from 960 to 1136. Employee costs were up 17% to £83m at an average of £73K each..
Management continues to invest in scaling the “cloud native next generation card acquiring Dojo platform” which it hopes will allow the business to expand into larger merchant segments as well as new territories. The business says that becoming an acquirer was a critical support for its growth strategy. Paymentsense has now received an e-money license for Ireland which it uses for a new Dojo business recently launched in Spain. Paymentsense believes that the hospitality-heavy Spanish payment market is ripe for a modern restaurant-focused payment proposition.
There is an intriguing subplot revolving around the company’s swanky central London office in the Brunel Building at Paddington, a location shared with the Premier League. Management reported £6.8m of property income generated by subletting unused floors of the Brunel building but has now committed to staying in the Brunel and leasing additional space. Before this decision, Paymentsense looked seriously at moving to the nearby Paddington Cube and is in dispute with its prospective landlord. The case will go to trial in 2025 although these matters are normally settled out of court.
Adjusted EBITDA rose from £69m to £94m with margin held steady at 23%.
Net debt rose £98m to £596m requiring interest payments of £91m, up from £62m in 2022. Paymentsense will need to maintain its fast pace of growth to support the higher interest payments associated with its new, long term debt. Total debt is equivalent to 6x EBITDA, still chunky, but down from 7x EBITDA in 2023.
Paymentsense made an operating profit for the first time of £32m, a very welcome milestone but not yet enough to cover the increasing cost of servicing its expanding mountain of debt. The business remains loss making at a pre-tax level although deficit was cut to £59m in 2023 from £141m the previous year. Accumulated losses now stand at an eyewatering £644m. Paymentsense has consumed a remarkable amount of capital.
Nevertheless, with its debt refinanced, management will be delighted with the 2023 results. All UK metrics are looking positive and the business is getting good at converting additional payment volume into profits. Continued growth in the UK will be challenging as Dojo maintains its higher price points and new entrants such as Shift4, Toast and a revitalised Global Payments compete for SME POS payments. Much may be riding on the Spanish expansion.
PAX, registered in Bermuda, listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange and with its main operations in China, blamed “global economic uncertainty” for its steadily declining topline. Although profitable and generating plenty of cash, PAX’s share price is bombed out. The market capitalisation is just $625m and the stock yields 10% at a PE of 5.
On the positive side, over 50% of sales are now Android “smart terminals.” This is a segment in which PAX, with a range of elegant keenly priced devices such as the A920, had early market leadership. Android offers terminal vendors the opportunity to upsell value added services – such as app stores – to bank and PSP customers. Critically, service revenue is recurring and can be secured under long-term contract.
PAX’s turnover from services, including maintenance and installation, is growing quickly from a low base, up 33% to $21m. Of this, $8m was software as a service revenue linked to the Maxstore product which brings together terminal management, reporting and a white-label app store. The apps themselves are supplied by 3rd parties and include booking, loyalty, labour scheduling and many more. Here’s a full list.
Maxstore generates big numbers. The service connects 12m terminals, 2m merchants, thousands of app developers and manages 215m push tasks annually.
Yet total service revenue of $21m in the last six months equates to less than $4 per installed terminal each year. There is a long way to go for Maxstore to make up for the long-term decline in device sales which fell 17% in H1 to $365m.
Competitors – notably Castles, Newland and Ingenico – are releasing new Android devices themselves and PAX will need to innovate to retain its leadership. PAX has launched a number of new models including the A8900 and A99 portables and the IM25 for unattended. The company is, very sensibly, extending into ECR hardware with new Elys series.
The devices are put together at the new PAX Smart Terminals Industrial Park at Huizhou, China, built at cost of $91m and featuring production lines, R&D and “well equipped dormitories” with a total floor area of 261.000 square metres.
Although PAX sells its product worldwide, most revenue comes from Europe and Latin America. In H1, the business was hit by a notably poor performance in LATAM where sales fell 21% to $137m. Brazil was particularly weak which management blames on the economy as well as slowing demand as the terminal market has matured. EMEA was more resilient, revenue was down just 4% to $137m with the region now accounting for 37% of global sales.
The best European markets were Italy, UK and Hungary with “fluctuating demand” reported in Germany and Spain. The A920PRO is reportedly selling well. PAX believes it has a major opportunity with the growing deployment of EV charging points following the EU’s AFIR directive.
In the US, PAX has seen a sharp slowdown in demand from ISOs and banks. Like many other payment businesses, it is reorientating sales to ISVs.
In APAC, PAX is buying its Australian distributor for up to $20m, depending on performance.
Cost of sales fell 19% to $205m resulting in a 10% decline in gross profit to $180m. Gross margin rose 2ppt to 47%, mainly due to the depreciation in the Renminbi reflecting PAX’s cost base in mainland China.
Management has taken a firm line with controllable costs. Employee expense was cut 18% to $50m. Staff numbers have been cut by 10% to 1596 staff, earning on average 9% less at an average of $31.4K.
R&D spend was steady at $39m.
Operating profit fell 21% to $69m. The operating margin fell just 1ppt to 18%, an impressive performance by most standards. But investors won’t be questioning how PAX makes money today. The worry is how it will continue to generate cash if terminal sales keep falling.
The summer’s results season showed a mixed picture from Europe’s three leading payment businesses.
Adyen stood out once again. Revenue grew 24% in the first half of the year as its omni-channel strategy helped drive volumes on both sides of the Atlantic. Adyen now boasts 357 “unified commerce” merchants processing over $10m in eCommerce and POS transactions. The in-store retail business is growing swiftly and Adyen now has almost 500K terminals in the field.
Worldline disappointed once again. Revenue was up just 3% and EBITDA fell 1% with management blaming Europe’s slowing economy and bad spring weather. It’s never a good sign when a payment business complains about rain.
The major Greek banks sold most or all of their merchant services units to international players during 2022/3 for a total of almost €1bn. Haris Karonis, founder of Viva Wallet, has predicted the banks will regret divesting these businesses but, so far, it’s hard to say they were wrong. Only Cardlink (Worldline) is making a profit and not a big one at that.
Greece should be a good market for payments. The domestic cash to card switch has a long way to run and there are plenty of high-margin cross-border transactions from tourists. Less positively, the new government in Athens has made it clear that it will legislate to reduce merchant services fees for SMEs if the acquirers don’t voluntarily take action.
Large or small, all merchant acquirers eagerly await the annual Nilson rankings which list the European players by transactions and payment volume. The 2023 numbers give a top ten of Worldpay, Nexi, Barclays, Fiserv, Adyen, Worldline, Global Payments, JP Morgan, Credit Agricole and Elavon but some observers have questioned the methodology. Several of the fast-growing digital acquirers such as Stripe, Nuvei, Paysafe and Checkout don’t even figure in the top 45 according to Nilson.
Wherever a business sits in Nilson’s league tables, competition is getting hotter as domestic champions in Asia move westwards. For example, two market leaders from India have announced European expansion plans in response to tougher market conditions at home.
Juspay, a payment orchestrator backed by Softbank, has hired James Lloyd, ex Citibank, to boost its European presence from a new base in Dublin. Juspay claims 300 processor connections and $500bn volume from 500 enterprise customers.
In corporate activity, Shift4 is buying Givex for C$200m (€132m) at a very generous c.30x EBITDA. Givex is most famous for its gift cards but has grown its retail POS portfolio to 1.900 merchant locations following the acquisition of Counter Solutions in the UK. Software accounts for 10% of worldwide revenue. Givex Pay (provided by Adyen) provides an extra 20%. Moving this volume to its own products will be an early win for Shift4.
Dejavoo, a US POS technology vendor offering white label solutions to PSPs (primarily with Castles hardware) has acquired Z-Credit, an Israeli equivalent. But we already knew this.
DNA Payments, a London based acquirer/PSP owned by two Kazakh former bankers, is reported to be considering purchasing the acquiring business of Card Complete, the largest player in Austria. Card Complete is losing money and needs significant technology investment. Unicredit, the Italian bank, is Card Complete’s largest shareholder and has been trying to sell its stake for some time.
Turning to fundraising, two start-ups targeting the complicated but fast-growing world of marketplace payments have secured new money.
Revenew, founded by two former Checkout execs, has raised $4.5m to help marketplaces and other merchants with complex payment needs to manage their costs, including reconciling IC++ pricing from multiple acquirers.
Trustap, based in Cork, Ireland, which offers escrow payments built on Stripe’s APIs for marketplaces, has raised a total of $9m.
Visa and Mastercard continue to prosper in Europe. The two schemes’ combined payment volume rose 11% in Q2. You can read more at Business of Payments.
Visa is very pleased with its sponsorship of the Paris Olympic Games which, it claims, saw a significant increase in foreign card spend in France, notably with visitors from US, Brazil and Japan. Theatres and museums saw the largest boost. Adyen also published statistics from its merchants in France which highlighted that 25% of US spending used dynamic currency conversion to pay in dollars, not euros. Good news for merchants and for Adyen that together share a 3% mark-up on each sale.
The UK’s Payment Systems Regulator is proposing to cap Interchange on eCommerce transactions from EU cardholders at UK merchants at the pre-Brexit levels of 0.2% or 0.3%. This is likely to save British businesses £150-£200m each year, a sum which ultimately finds its way to European banks today. Unsurprisingly, these banks are objecting.
Visa and Mastercard pass interchange to the issuing banks. The two schemes make their own cross-border profits from additional fees and foreign exchange commissions. For example, Visa’s USD/EUR mark-up is 0.21%. The ex-CEO of Wise (who knows something about FX) explains how it works.
There is a threat looming. Visa and Mastercard’s dominance of cross-border consumer payments will be challenged by increased inter-operability of the new wave of mobile-centric domestic payment schemes and standards. This will allow people to spend money abroad without needing a credit card.
Alipay, the very popular payment method in China, is a good example. Alipay is now interoperable with 30 other Asian QR based wallets and 14 of these are already connected to its European platform. This means Alipay’s 400,000 European merchants can accept payments from the most popular wallets used by visitors from Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere.
The emergence of software vendors as a key distribution channel is the biggest shake-up the payment industry has seen for many years. Who is winning? Nick Dunse from Shuttle, a business that connects shopping carts and payment processors, counts 1986 software platforms of which a remarkable 59% use Stripe.
Shuttle’s figures refer to number of connections rather than payment volume. Adyen has relatively few ISVs but is signing the large ones. Latest examples include One Iota, a UK in-store ePOS vendor which counts Hugo Boss among its clients.
ISVs can more than double their revenue from their core business of selling software by adding payments and other financial services to the merchant bundle. Toast, a US restaurant software provider is a textbook example (see chart below). Alexandre Dewez explains the economics.
Acquirers need to buy, build or partner with ISVs to secure this new distribution channel. A good example is Swedbank, which participated in a €20m funding roundfor Yabie, a Swedish ePOS start-up focused on small retailers and cafes. The investment is paying off. Yabie generated €12m sales in 2023 from 11,000 merchant customers processing with Swedbank although it will partner with Adyen to support clients outside the Nordics.
Other partnership news is coming thick and fast as the ecosystem reassembles itself around ISVs.
Cardstream, a UK based gateway, has ambitions to support ISVs with its new payment-facilitator-as-a-service proposition. Surfboard, a Swedish ePOS and SoftPOS vendor, is the first customer and will take a joint proposition to market.
FreedomPay, the US POS gateway, is also looking to grow its European business, supplying ISVs with acquirer-agnostic terminals and transaction routing. It has announced new partnerships with Zonal, a UK ISV focused on hospitality (using Castles devices) and LS Retail, a mid-market retail ePOS vendor based on Microsoft Dynamics. LS offers acquiring from Adyen and Elavon.
New Shopping
2023 was a record year for self-checkout with over 217,000 machines delivered worldwide, up 12% on the previous year. Europe is the fastest growing region with growth powered by large scale implementations at grocery and pharmacy chains in the UK and Germany.
Nexi has partnered with shopreme, based in Graz, Austria to bring integrated payment/mobile checkout to merchants, initially in DACH markets with Italy and Nordics to follow.
Smart carts offer a half-way house between self-checkout and fully autonomous shops. The sensors and cameras sit in the shopping trolley not the store’s shelving units.
Aldi is trialling Caper Carts, a digital shopping trolley supplied by Instacart, at an outlet in Austria, having already introduced the carts in the US. This is Aldi’s second such pilot, the first using technology from Shopic which attaches to existing carts, didn’t last long.
Photo: Stephan Ruschen
Home shopping was meant to be transformed by voice commerce enabled by Amazon’s 500m Alexa devices. The reality is that these gadgets are not generating revenue despite the massive investment. “We’re worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” a disappointed employee told the press. It’s time for a rethink.
Will AI give natural language commerce the boost it needs? Dan Wagner, a colourful British entrepreneur, is back with Rezolve, an AI powered conversational commerce plug-in which, he confidently expects, will be adopted by most leading eCommerce websites. Rezolve has reversed into a SPAC listed on NASDAQ and now commands an improbable valuation of $1.7bn. If you’ve experience working with Rezolve, let me know.
Biometrics
Most Europeans and most Americans can pay for things simply by using the biometric authentication already set up with their mobile phone. Yet vendors continue to experiment with alternative payment flows in which the biometrics are stored by the merchant or PSP.
Payeye, a Polish start-up which is pioneering payments based on iris and facial recognition, has signed a partnership with Worldline to commercialise its eyepos 3terminal outside Poland. Recognising that the technology may take some time to mature, the terminal also takes cards. ITcard remains Payeye’s domestic partner.
A fascinating battle is emerging for control of eCommerce guest checkouts. A number of global players are vying to improve conversion rates by securely storing shoppers’ payment credentials to enable one-click shopping.
Apple Pay is the market leader and makes its money through charging the credit card issuers c.15bp of the transaction value. Others, such as Stripe and Shopify, hope their pay buttons will encourage more merchants to choose their payment processing or commerce software.
Although most one-click checkouts back the transaction onto a credit card, Visa and Mastercard are worried about disintermediation and have put renewed focus on Click to Pay, their own guest checkout product.
As predicted, eService, the largest acquirer in Poland, has terminated LitePOS, its softPOS product based on MyPinPad’s technology. eService will now sell Global Payments’ TOM (terminal on mobile) instead. This micro-merchant proposition retails at 5 PLN (€1.10) per month + transaction fees.
UK vendors have begun to realise that “the biggest banks are not prioritising building up their capability or technology,” sparking calls for thegovernment to rescue open banking from its current disappointing state. For example, Yapily’s CEO has called for early legislation to create a permanent entity to manage the open banking ecosystem, oblige the banks to take the technology seriously and mandate a funding model that no longer relies on voluntary contributions.
Valuations are beginning to reflect a growing realisation that open banking will take longer to mature than many had hoped. Paypoint, a UK ISO and bill payment specialist, has bought a majority share of OB Connect at a valuation of just c.£30m. This is a great exit for the management and a fine return on the £3m capital invested but indicates that the sector is unlikely to produce many unicorns. OB Connect, which has 25 staff, lost c.£0.8m in 2023.
Even so, open banking adoption will be slow if it relies on hosted payment pages and redirects. Customer experience needs to be slicker. Boodil, a UK start-up, believes it is first to market with an embedded solution that sits within the merchant’s own payment page. Yapily is managing the APIs behind the scenes.
Could POS payments provide open banking a boost? DNA Payments, which is having a busy time of late, has added open banking to its payment terminals. Shoppers scan a QR code produced by the POS. Ecospend, Trustly’s UK subsidiary, is providing the technology. The value to consumers, used to tapping smartphones on payment terminals, is not clear.
There is a small but growing argument for Request to Pay (RTP) as an alternative to open banking for consumer-to-business payments. Toriipay, a Polish start-up founded by former Kevin execs, believes RTP offers the standardisation missing from open banking today. RTP is a messaging system sitting on top of SEPA Instant as you can see from the video.
Crypto corner
The continual drip of bad news stories about crypto criminals hasn’t dented market enthusiasm. Bitcoin trades near an all-time high.
The UK regulator has issued over 1,000 warnings to crypto firms since October leading to the removal of 48 apps from the local app stores. It may also have led many crypto companies avoiding the UK and setting up elsewhere which is no bad thing.
It’s depressing that established brands are still mixed up with this boondoggle. Mastercard continues issuing crypto cards. These convert your favourited digital currency to actual dollars to pay the merchant although Ferrari will now let you buy one of its sports cars using crypto following requests from “wealthy customers.” The dealers receive real money. Somebody makes a spread. It’s not clear who.
In other news
Some helpful research from McKinsey on 15 technology trends you need to know. Next-gen software development comes top, closely followed by applied AI.
It’s remarkable to find Americans still writing cheques. Target, the retail giant, will finally stop accepting them but there are some things for which only a cheque will do. The cast of Saturday Night Live explain. Enjoy.
Worldline disappointed investors as it blamed macro-factors for slow growth in H1 2024 and shared a downbeat assessment of the outlook for the rest of the year. Giles Grabinet, CEO, called out a “volatile consumer spending environment that exhibited a visible softening across many European countries in the second quarter.”
Revenue grew just 2% to €2.289bn with all three divisions – merchant services, financial services and mobile/ticketing struggling to grow sales faster than inflation.
Merchant solutions is the largest division and also the one that interests us most at Business of Payments.
Merchant volume was up 5% at €230bn in H1 2024 but all the growth came in the first quarter. Q2 volume was flat at €120bn with management blaming the wet spring and a “particularly weak June.”
Merchant revenue was up just 3% to €1.6581bn with the take rate dropping 1bp to 0.72%. Growth was constrained by “softer macroeconomic conditions” despite a resilient performance in Italy and the travel/gaming verticals.
Sales were also hit by the loss of €130m annual revenue from the termination of a set of high-risk merchants. €40m of this reduction was from Germany and followed BAFIN’s intervention at PayOne, Worldline’s troubled JV with the local savings banks. Worldline’s share of PayOne’s losses was €88.4m in 2023 although it did receive a dividend of €18.4m.
Worldline’s growth problem is reflecting in its merchant metrics which show it failing to profit from the shift in commerce to online sales. The total number of merchants rose 3% to 1.22m of which the vast majority (85%) are still trading F2F. Annualised payment volume per merchant rose just 2% to €377K, revenue per merchant was flat at €2,718 and adjusted EBITDA per merchant fell 6% to €633.
Management promises that new products and distribution partnerships will restore the business to growth. The most important initiative is the Credit Agricole JV which Wordline confirmed will go live in the first half of 2025. The new business, called Cawl (for Credit Agricole Worldline) will allow Worldline access to the acquiring market in France for the first time.
Cawl will be competing with a newly announced JV between two other French banks, BPCE and BNP, which also has grand ambitions. Giles Grapinet is unphased, saying that although these two banks bring “extremely powerful distribution” this newly created partnership will use in-house systems and will struggle without an external technology partner.
Worldline’s expansion into Italy, in partnership with local banks is going well and growing in the“very strong double digits.” The latest deal, Worldline’s fifth, is with CCB bank, and brings an additional 60.000 (very small) merchants processing €6bn in total. Migration begins in the second half.
Management made no update on progress at Worldline’s very expensive JV with ANZ Bank. In 2022, Worldline paid €307m for its 51% of the business which processes 20% of transaction volume in Australia. Worldline’s share of the JV’s losses was €39m in 2023 and it had to invest a further €20.4m in H1 2024.
Away from bank partnerships, Wordline had good news to share with other new products and commercial deals including:
Worldline’s combined payment solution for marketplaces and platforms with OPP, a Dutch eCommerce gateway acquired in 2022, is now live with 165 partners.
Worldline says there are likely to be 2.5m public EV charging points in Europe by 2030. With more than 20 EV charging operators representing more than 25% of the market, Wordline says it is well placed to capture the promised growth. Two new EV partners were signed in H1 – Ampeco and EnerCharge.
Other new merchants included Luxair, (acquiring and APMs), IWG (payment orchestration and collecting), North Consulting (vending linked to local acquirers in the Nordics) and Cdiscount (online smart routing).
Worldline’s brief outage in the UK during July had limited impact. Marc-Henri Desportes, deputy CEO, said “We handled it very professionally, keeping a very good engagement with our customers. Impact is limited and outages, unfortunately, in our industry, it happens from time to time even to the biggest ones in the tech industry.”
Management called out cost pressures from the steady migration of domestic cards to international schemes, notably in Italy, but said it was standardising on IC++ to mitigate the risk. Worldline has been a strong supporter of the EPI and Giles Grapinet reiterated the need for strong European payment schemes. “It’s part of our playbook ..to make sure that there is diversity at point of sale and that there is never one monopoly route that is going to impose its condition on the entire ecosystem.”
Merchant solutions adjusted EBITDA fell 3% to €386m in H1 as margins dropped 2bps to 23%.
Turning to Worldline’s two smaller divisions, financial services revenue was down 2% to €457m and adjusted EBITDA down 1% to €126m. Issuer and acquirer processing performed well, especially in Germany. New wins included Sonet and MarketPay for Italy, but the topline was hit by the earlier loss of some large contracts.
Mobility revenue was up 2% at €174m and adjusted EBITDA up 36% at €30m. Worldline renewed to large contracts that include ticketing and payments – one in the event sector, the other with an energy company.
Group adjusted EBITDA (formerly known by a French acronym as OMDA) fell 1% to €514m.
After integration and rationalisation costs (€58m) and Power24 (€174m), unadjusted EBITDA fell 34% to €282m.
The Power24 programme will see hundreds of staff exit the business in the second half of this year. The new operating model is live from August and the exercise is expected to save €220m annual costs, 10% higher than originally expected. 29% of staff are now located in “low cost” countries, mainly India, Poland and Romania and this proportion should rise to 33% in 2025.
After deducting depreciation and amortisation, Worldline recorded an operating loss of €16m following a profit of €120m in the same period last year.
Looking ahead, management says growth is constrained by “European domestic consumption uncertainties” and is targeting a very modest 2-3% organic revenue increase. Investors were unimpressed and the stock trades at around €8 compared to a peak of €80 in 2021. Despite the negative market reaction, Grabinet believes that “Worldline will quickly start to benefit from a strengthened competitiveness and operational leverage that will drive solid medium- term performance.”
Global Payments European merchant revenue growth dropped to 7% in Q2 as the effect of the EVO acquisition dropped out of the year-on-year comparisons. The Atlanta based acquirer/processor reported “notable strength across our faster-growth geographies, including Poland and Greece” and said it was “pleased to see trends start to stabilize in the United Kingdom.”
The integration of EVO’s European businesses has enhanced Global Payment’s existing strong footprint in the UK (where Global inherited a decent merchant portfolio from its 2009 acquisition of HSBC merchant services), Spain (80/20 JV with Caixa Bank) and Czech Republic (partnering with Erste Bank). EVO also brought two extra joint-ventures with local banks – PKO BP in Poland and National Bank of Greece.
Starting with the UK, management says that, after several years of weaknesss, business is showing “some signs of stability” and Global Payments now has a “strong pipeline of new business.” Hospitality and unattended are the bright spots and Cameron Bready, CEO, highlighted winning Virgin’s hotel business.
Although Global Payments has spent heavily in the US on buying a number of vertically focused ISVs, most of these businesses do not actively market their products in Europe. However, Global did buy a UK software business called Bleep which provides an ePOS solution for high-capacity retail such as stadiums. Rebranded as Global Payments, it is winning deals at a number of UK football clubs such as Birmingham City.
Commerz Global Pay, the joint venture with Commerz Bank in Germany, went live and is “off to a fantastic start.” Bready said he was “already seeing strong lead generation” and confident of building “a scale business in this attractive market.” Management says it will launch its POS software in Germany later this month and will bring it to Ireland, Poland, Austria and Romania over the next 12 months.
Global also reported the acquisition of “an early-stage technology development company” which it did not name. This is Yazara, a SoftPOS vendor originally from Turkey, which was already supplying Global in a number of markets. Bready said it was “strategically important for us to bring this technology in-house to unify our offerings globally and to control the entire value stack enabling our solutions.” This is a good move although Yazara’s other customers may not be so happy with a key competitor controlling the business.
Looking ahead, management recognises that a business built primarily from acquisitions needs rationalising. Bready said “we remain committed to sharpening our strategic focus and simplifying our business.” Global has begun a “thoughtful and methodical assessment of our assets” and promises to give more details at an investor day in September. Analysts expect the sale of a number of under-performing US software businesses.
Visa and Mastercard continue to prosper in Europe with total total scheme volume rising 11% in Q2 to €1.206 trillion, outpacing retail sales growth by some distance. The average transaction value (ATV) fell 2% to €32.89 as low-value purchases continue to migrate from cash to card.
Visa still processes more than Mastercard in Europe but the margin is narrowing. Mastercard has been successful in winning issuer portfolios from its arch rival and is growing more quickly. In Q2, Mastercard’s volume rose 12.3% compared with 10.5% at Visa.
Speaking about the Q2 results, Michael Miebach, Mastercard’s CEO said he believed the pandemic forced Europe to digitise more quickly but that the continent still offers great growth potential. “If you look at the economies in Germany, in Italy, there’s significant cash … that we can go after,” he explained. Where markets are already digitally mature, he still sees opportunities saying “The Nordics is a good example of that. There’s a whole new set of business models coming up… So I’m excited about the Europe outlook, and we continue to invest there. Bottom line.”
One of Mastercard’s main growth drivers is the conversion of Maestro cards – mainly in Germany and Netherlands – to debit Mastercard. The switch seems to be going well and Miebach reported seeing spend per card doubling because they can now be used online and outside their home country. 14m cards were converted in H1.
Visa is fighting back. It has resigned Lloyds Bank in the UK for debit and won its credit portfolio back from Mastercard, gaining an additional 10m credentials for consumer and commercial cards. Visa also renewed its commercial card contract with Raiffeisen and expanded consumer debit and credit in Czech and Romania, bringing 2m more cards. Visa has pushed hard on its Olympic sponsorship and claims to have added 100.000 merchant locations in France and issued nearly 6m Olympic branded cards.
Of course, cash isn’t going away. Together, Visa and Mastercard processed €271bn cash transactions in Q2. The total volume is flat but the transactions are gently declining (down 3%) as the ATV rose 5% to €159.
Both schemes have updated investors on lawsuits. In the UK one large legal action has been rumbling on since 2013 in which over 1150 merchants made a claim relating to excessive interchange fees. Visa says it has settled 475 merchants but £500m of claims still remain to be agreed. Meanwhile, the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal is hearing a class action related to interchange fees on commercial cards for which Mastercard is on the hook for damages of up to £1bn. Finally, a new lawsuit has begun in Portugal in which merchants are claiming damages of €400m from Mastercard for excessive interchange fees.
In product news, contactless is now the standard way to pay at POS. 80% of Visa’s face to face transactions outside the US are contactless with 55 countries at >90% contactless at POS.
Mastercard reiterated its commitment to phasing out PAN card entry for eCommerce in Europe in favour of one-click checkout. This is primarily delivered by the mass adoption of network tokens to support stored-credentials used by merchants for account-based checkout. Tokens have been a huge success. Worldwide, Mastercard says tokenised transactions were up 49% year on year. Visa has over 10bn tokens generating, it says, an incremental $40bn eCommerce revenue for merchants and saving more than $600m fraud.
Both schemes are still pushing Click to Pay for guest checkout but it’s tough going in the face of entrenched competition from PayPal, ApplePay, Stripe, Shopify and others. Mastercard says Click to Pay transactions “more than doubled” and it is “working with our merchants and bank partners to drive adoption.” Visa is integrating Click to Pay and Visa Passkey which enables cardholders to authenticate themselves using biometrics. Visa says it has “hundreds” of issuers representing more than 50% of eCommerce volume in pilot.
Visa Direct, a product which allows money to be sent to Visa cards, is finally delivering results. Total transactions were up 41% to 2.6bn in the quarter and European volumes using Visa Direct for person-to-person transactions “nearly doubled.” In the UK, Weavr, a fintech, is using Visa Direct to offer employee expense reimbursement, reward, recognition and earned wage access.
Neither scheme disclosed numbers relating to open banking although Visa said Tink, its open banking business, “continues to sign new partners.” With the continued growth in push-payment fraud, Visa sees an opportunity to sell its fraud expertise to banks. Visa Protect -a risk scoring solution – has piloted with Pay.UK and showed “average of 40% uplift in fraud detection” when applied to A2A transfers.
Banco Sabadell remains committed to selling its merchant services business to Nexi although the deal is on hold as the Catalan bank focuses on defeating a hostile takeover from BBVA, a larger Spanish competitor.
Speaking during the Q2 2024 results call, Sabadell CEO Cesar Gonzalez-Bueno confirmed that, “all necessary regulatory approvals have been secured, and the deal will be finalised following the conclusion of the hostile tender offer.” He went on to say that there are no break clauses, and the sale to Nexi is expected to proceed around mid-2025, approximately almost two years later than initially planned.
BBVA has not made any statement about whether the sale to Nexi would proceed should it be successful in buying Sabadell. BBVA has a good in-house merchant services offer. It could deliver considerable synergies by merging the two businesses and has less need of Nexi’s technical expertise and product roadmap. Nexi has indicated that the deal is “not automatic.”
Nexi had agreed to pay €350m for Sabadell’s merchant services unit which processes about 20% of card payments in Spain through 380,000 merchants. The sale price was reported to be based on a run rate of €30m EBITDA. However, Sabadell also disclosed that the delayed sale is not expected to impact the bank’s profit and loss statement, implying that its merchant services business is currently operating at breakeven point.
Profitable or not, Sabadell continues to display healthy topline growth. Merchant payment volume increased by 9% to €14bn in Q2 and consistently maintains a yearly run rate of over €50bn. Meanwhile, the average transaction value has decreased by 3% to €31.50 as the adoption of contactless payments continues to drive the conversion of low-value cash transactions to card payments.
