Payments solutions giant TSYS has acquired payments technology and merchant-acquiring company Cayan for $1.05 billion in cash. The acquisition will help Columbus, Georgia-based TSYS grow their client base for merchant acquiring in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market, a major focus for their strategic goals moving forward.
Boston-based Cayan currently provides their products, which include a merchant-acquiring platform called Genius and other software solutions, to over 70,000 merchants across the U.S. After the merger, the combined company will serve 730,000 merchant locations with $138B in processing volume.
In a webcast following the acquisition announcement, Philip McHugh, TSYS Senior Executive VP and President of Merchant Solutions, said that Cayan’s platform will improve upon TSYS’s software capabilities.
“The actual software integration platform that we have is good, but it’s not great. And it was always top of mind, is what is to go-to platform? Cayan always stood out… so that now becomes the go-to platform for us to really expand and build out our capabilities,” said McHugh.
TSYS executives also explained that the two companies are strong in different verticals — for example, Cayan has a particular strength in the retail industry, which TSYS has currently not tapped as much as other verticals like healthcare.
“I see our integrated capabilities becoming even more competitive, I see our presence in key verticals expanding. I see the match of our distribution and their product really giving us a competitive edge,” said McHugh.
TSYS’s suite of products include payments technologies on the issuer, or buyer side, along with software and solutions for the merchants. Last year, TSYS expanded their merchant business with the acquisition of New York-based merchant solutions provider TransFirst for $2.35 billion.
This acquisition, which is expected to close in Q1 2018, will further grow that side of their business.
“Our ambition is to be the leading SMB payments player in the United States,” said McHugh.
TSYS employs approximately 11,500 across 13 countries and processes more than 25.5 billion transactions.
