Nuvei Corp. of Montreal, a financial technology company, intends to buy Simplex, a FinTech catering to the cryptocurrency industry, for about $250 million.
The all-cash deal, subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close in the second half of 2021, the companies said in a press release. Nuvei, a digital payments-processing company, is traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Simplex, founded in 2014, is payments processor for cryptocurrencies. The release said that Simplex processed about $500 million in transactions in 2020 and is expected to process more than $2.0 billion in transactions this year.
Simplex delivers the infrastructure for users to buy or sell cryptocurrencies using credit and debit cards. Its platform includes “proprietary fraud and risk management tools,” the release said. The company also issues Visa cards.
Nuvei expects that Simplex will “enhance and expand Nuvei’s steadily growing portfolio of alternative payment methods,” said Philip Fayer, Nuvei’s chair and CEO. “Simplex’s infrastructure is a natural fit for Nuvei’s Native Commerce Platform, further strengthening the capabilities and overall value proposition of our single-integration approach to payments.”
“Today is a very special day for all of the Simplex team, as well as the entire cryptocurrency community,” said Nimrod Lehavi, Simplex’s co-founder and CEO. “By joining Nuvei, Simplex will be able to fulfill its promise of bridging the gap between the blockchain space and the traditional finance world.”
“More and more end-users, more and more consumers are going to store value in digital currency,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire told PYMNTS. However, he said, typically there is a “stutter step” inherent in crypto transactions.
The process of accepting and settling digital currency transactions takes time and adds costs. For cryptocurrencies to move forward, the stutter step must be cut out of the process.
The needed ecosystem is taking shape, said Allaire. Using blockchain to facilitate payments takes some of the steps out of the equation.
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