Verifone has just announced its acquisition of Point, an alternative payment provider in Europe, in order to expand its ability to offer mobile payment services for retailers and other merchants.
Verifone has many different offerings for payment services, but is now focusing on near field communications (NFC) terminals, which would permit customers to use their mobile devices or credit cards to complete payment transactions when they make a purchase at a point of sale.
In total, all of the equity and assets at Point were purchased for $816 million, and Point’s outstanding debts were settled by an additional payment by Verifone for $231 million.
Point is a Stockholm-based company that already provides alternative payment services to over 450,000 merchant clients located in eleven different countries. That company is currently responsible for handling point-of-sale transactions, and currently performs an average of over 10 million individual transactions every day.
By acquiring Point, Verifone is hoping to improve its position in the fight for a place in the emerging mobile payment services world, where giants such as Google, PayPal, and the major credit card companies such as MasterCard and Visa are already vying for dominance.
Verifone has been boosting its efforts significantly over the last short while, having spent well over $1 billion every year to take in a larger number of small providers of payment services. Now that Verifone has Point, it intends to create the biggest rapid mobile payment infrastructure in the world. It has announced that within the next year, the Point acquisition will have added an additional $260 million to the company’s bottom line.
