Checkout Advances its Mobile Payments Case With ProcessOut Acquisition

One great sign of a maturing market is merger and acquisition (M&A) activity. When a market starts to consolidate, when some firms drop out of play and others are bought up by larger entities or team up, you can tell the market is established. Mobile payments must now be considered a maturing market, thanks to reports like those we recently received from our friends at Checkout.com. Recently, the company acquired ProcessOut, a French payments company, which gives Checkout a little extra leverage in the wider market.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but given that Checkout has a valuation of almost $2 billion, it’s safe to say the purchase was probably not in the eight-figure range. ProcessOut isn’t exactly a huge operation, either, with just 14 employees to its credit, but all 14 will have new jobs with Checkout, so that’s welcome news.

For such a small company, ProcessOut had excellent range. ProcessOut had a hand in just over 10 percent of all online transactions in France in 2019. That accounts for just over $20 billion in transactions just in the last 12 months that were analyzed by ProcessOut’s systems. With ProcessOut’s systems in Checkout’s hands, the company will be able to ramp up offerings to enterprise customers, including new tools to both streamline and optimize payment routing functions.

Checkout’s expansion plans don’t stop there, either; it’s recently added an Electronic Money Institution license to its credit from French officials, and it plans to nearly double its employee count from around 600 to a full thousand by the end of 2020.

It’s not exactly a huge change, but it should go quite some ways toward giving Checkout extra ammunition to work with out in the field. In a market where choices are plentiful—so much so that they’re actually starting to consolidate—having a ready supply of reasons to choose one firm over another becomes vital to that company’s long-term survival. By purchasing ProcessOut, Checkout gave itself better access to the French market, as well as new tools for its current market.

This puts Checkout in an excellent position, and gives the company a whole new lease on life going forward. Only time will tell just how well it works, but Checkout has certainly given itself a leg up going forward.