NMI Expands Underwriting Capabilities With Acquisition of Sphere’s Commercial Division

NMI, a full commerce enablement technology company, has acquired software and payments technology company Sphere’s Commercial Division.

This move aims to enhance NMI’s underwriting and risk management capabilities, while also providing its partners with simplified payment solutions, the companies said in a Friday (Oct. 13) press release.

With this acquisition, NMI partners, including independent software vendors (ISVs), independent sales organizations (ISOs) and FinTech innovators, will be able to create merchant accounts within the existing NMI platform, according to the release. This means that partners can offer their merchants increased flexibility and a wider range of payment capabilities.

Merchants consider payments to be a highly strategic area of focus, but many need outside partners to help them identify the right payment tools and assist with their implementation, the release said. By adding Sphere’s Commercial Division underwriting and risk management capabilities, NMI partners can monetize more of the value chain by offering additional payment capabilities to their merchants.

Vijay Sondhi, CEO of NMI, said in the release: “The addition of Sphere’s Commercial Division allows us to add yet another module to our stack of payment enablement tools, providing our partners with the modularity and choice to better customize payment experiences for their merchants.”

Sphere Commercial Division COO and President Tom Bannon added, “It is a natural fit to combine our capabilities with NMI’s platform because our vision aligns well with NMI’s goal to provide partners access to any and all the payment capabilities they could need.”

This acquisition comes about 10 months after NMI’s December 2022 purchase of the payments solutions of onboarding software provider Agreement Express, which included onboarding, underwriting and risk monitoring capabilities.

NMI said at the time that the deal with Agreement Express would expand its capabilities by giving ISVs, ISOs and FinTechs services such as customizable risk scoring, automated data collection, compliance monitoring, and ongoing know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud screenings.

Today, with over 3,900 ISV, ISO, and FinTech partners, NMI supports more than 280,000 merchants on its platform, facilitating over 2.3 billion transactions and processing more than $200 billion in payments volume, according to the press release.