Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo sells merchant acquiring to Nexi for $1.1 billion

Following its $2.3 billion IPO, payment processor Nexi made another large deal to scale its merchant services.

By acquiring Intesa Sanpaolo's merchant acquiring business, Nexi will obtain a network of about 380,000 point of sale terminals at 180,000 businesses. The bank will acquire a 9.9% stake in Nexi, which had one of Europe's largest public offerings of 2019 in April.

“The acquisition of Nexi shares by Intesa Sanpaolo represent for us a further signal of confidence in the company’s development outlook and in its mission of being the PayTech company, an independent partner, of Italian banks,” said Paolo Bertoluzzo, CEO of Nexi, in a release.

The Intesa Sanpaolo/Nexi deal is expected to close in the summer of 2020. The bank's merchant acquiring unit will be transferred to a Nexi subsidiary.

Nexi is one of Italy’s largest payment processors and merchant acquirers. It currently serves 890,000 merchants with 1.4 million POS terminals with its partner banks and manages a fleet of 13,400 ATMs across the country. It is also a payment card issuer processor for banks, managing a portfolio of 41 million cards for its bank clients.

Intesa Sanpaolo in October invested in MatiPay, a wireless vending machine-based cash acceptance network. The MatiPay network has 1,000 NFC-enabled cash accepting vending machines in place and Intesa Sanpaolo’s about $7.8 million investment in the company would allow it to expand to an additional 10,000 machines.

In November 2018 Intesa Sanpaolo announced that it would be launching a 16-week biometric contactless card pilot in Italy with Mastercard, Fingerprints AB and Gemalto in Turin, Milan and Rome.