EML Payments acquires Sentenial Group and Nuapay for €110 million

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Payments solutions platform EML Payments Limited has announced the acquisition of API payments company Sentenial Limited and its subsidiaries, including Open Banking pioneer Nuapay, for a total of €110 million.

By entering into a binding agreement, EML will acquire 100 per cent of Sentenial for an upfront enterprise value of €70 million, plus an earn-out component of up to €40 million.

Sentenial and subsidiary Nuapay have been early movers in the Open Banking and Account-2-Account (A2A) payments sector in Europe. Sentenial is a cloud-native, API-first, full-stack enterprise-grade payments company, processing €45 billion per annum, and is dually regulated in the United Kingdom and France.

The companies already provide EML with the capabilities to manage payments across scheme (Mastercard and Visa) and non-scheme (A2A), as well as both card and non-card payments.

The acquisition broadens the EML product suite and positions EML to be able to take advantage of rapid scale growth in the Open Banking sector in Europe and to expand the capability across all regions.

EML also intends to expand Sentenial’s platform and products into the North American and Australian markets over the coming 12-18 months – post-completion of the acquisition, the combined group is expected to become one of the largest FinTech enablers in Open Banking and Prepaid globally.

Commenting, Tom Cregan, EML’s Managing Director & Group CEO, stated: “EML has transitioned over the years from primarily a gift-card company to a company with a diverse revenue base across multiple prepaid products. The acquisition of Sentenial will be the next evolution for EML, as we transition into a broader payments business by adding instant A2A payments into our suite of solutions for current and prospective customers.

“The net result of bringing the companies together allows EML to increase our Total Addressable Market by expanding our product suite, and we see a number of opportunities to cross-sell A2A payments into existing EML customers, and vice versa.”

Also commenting, Sean Fitzgerald, Founder & CEO at Sentenial, said: “Nuapay’s mission is to be the best way to pay and get paid. We are proud to have developed a market-leading A2A and Open Banking payments platform over nearly two decades in business. The revolution in payments caused by Open Banking and real-time payments is rapidly building momentum globally, and we are hugely excited by this opportunity to move to a global scale as part of EML. From the moment EML approached us, we’ve been impressed by their vision, ambition and growing ecosystem.”

The combined group will process in excess of A$90 billion in Gross Debit Volume (‘GDV’). Completion of the deal is subject to regulatory approval, and the acquisition is expected to complete in late FY21.