Payments Innovation Investment Tracker | Week of July 25

July has turned out to be an acquisitive month in payments and commerce. Again this week the predominance of activity is the result of acquisitions – in banking and in the hardware/terminal side of the payments business. Security dominated and prepaid lagged.

The Big Takeaways for Payments and Commerce

• $8.9 Billion in financial activity was observed across a variety of investment types – VC funding, private placements, etc.  Of that total, $316 Million was the driven by strategic or venture –backed investments the biggest transaction was the acquisition of OneWest Bank by CIT Group for $3.4 Billion. The second was the acquisition of Lindorff by Nordic Capital for for $3.1 Billion.

• 60 percent of the week’s activity was concentrated on the retail payments side and most of it was related to the acquisitions of OneWest Bank by CIT Group and of GlobalCollect by Ingenico Group ($1.1 Bn).  On the commercial payments side Lindorff acquisition was the biggest move followed by the acquisition of Quintiq by Dassault Systèmes ($337 Million).
• Venture backed and strategic investments on the retail payments side accounted for  $217M of the total investment activity in the fourth week of July. Of that, almost all was venture.

• Interestingly, most of the venture and strategic backed investments were in the banking and security areas accounting for 72 percent of the total. P2P ($1 Million),  mobile money ($1 Million), authentication/biometrics, and prepaid  reflected the least amount of investment activity.
• The most active VCs included Tiger Global Management ($75 Million), Riverwood Capital ($40 Million) and Oak Investment Partners ($30 Million).

• From a geographic perspective US was the most active region followed by Europe.
  
• The median investment amount was $22.6 Million.

The Retail and Commercial Payments Top 20

Here are the top 20 investments that drove 99 percent of the funding activity in the third week of July 2014.