Here’s what happened in the first week of August:
The Big Takeaways for Payments and Commerce
- $1.2 Billion in financial activity was observed across a variety of investment types – VC funding, private placements, etc. Of that total, $1,053.6 M was the driven by strategic or venture –backed investments the biggest transaction was the 10 percent stake investment of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Coin in Rocket Internet for $446 M. The second was the acquisiton of TouchNet Information Systems, Inc. by Heartland Payment Systems for $375 M.
- 62 percent of the week’s activity was concentrated on the retail payments side and 72 percent of it was related to the investment of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. On the commercial payments side TouchNet Information Systems, Inc. acquisiton was the biggest move, with 98 percent of the funds.
- Venture backed and strategic investments on the retail payments side accounted for $668M of the total investment activity in the first week of August. Of that, two thirds were strategic investments.
- Interestingly, most of the venture and strategic backed investments were in the payments and security/fraud areas accounting for 92 percent of the total. Banking ($5 Million), mobile money ($3 Million), point of sales systems ($ -) and prepaid ($-)reflected the least amount of investment activity.
- The most active VCs included Sequoia Capital ($32 Million), SingTel Innov8 ($25 Million) and Toba Capital ($10 Million).
- From a geographic perspective US and Europe were the most active regions.
- The median investment amount was $4 Million.
The Retail and Commercial Payments Top 20
Here are the top 20 investments that drove 99 percent of the funding activity in the first week of August 2014.
