Deluxe to Acquire Celero Commerce: Toward Payments and Data

Deluxe reached an agreement to purchase Celero Commerce for $625 million, accelerating its pivot from check printing into modern payment technology and data-driven services.

Key Takeaways

• Chief Executive Officer Barry McCarthy said the purchase speeds the company’s transformation, with the deal aimed at adding a scaled platform that can support faster product rollout and deeper cross-selling across Deluxe’s customer base.

For established providers, acquisitions like this are often about compressing time-to-scale: you buy proven operating capacity and then layer your broader product set on top.

Context and Insight

Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, Celero Commerce serves small and mid-sized businesses with an integrated, omnichannel payments suite, selling a bundled mix of acceptance tools, point-of-sale support, payment gateway connectivity, recurring billing, reporting, and value-added services delivered directly and through referral and partner channels.

• No publicly disclosed acquisitions.

Celero founder and chief executive officer Kevin Jones said combining Deluxe’s scale and resources with Celero’s technology, channel expertise, and customer-first culture will create a stronger platform for clients and partners while opening new growth paths. Celero adds day-to-day operational capabilities such as merchant onboarding, device deployment, support operations, and unified reporting across in-person and online transactions.

Collectively last year, Deluxe and Celero handled roughly $70 billion in gross payment volume, which would place the combined entity among the 10 largest nonbank merchant acquirers in the United States. Launched in 2018, Celero handles about $28 billion annually for roughly 55,000 United States business customers. Celero does not publicly disclose its annual revenue.

Deluxe, based in Minneapolis and founded in 1915, has been remaking itself as check usage declines, investing to scale its payments operations and data-driven marketing offerings. The Deluxe Check Company is owned by Deluxe.

That shift aligns with broader trends. Last year, the Trump administration directed the federal government to move away from paper checks as part of a payments modernization effort.

Three business lines now account for about two-thirds of Deluxe’s $2.1 billion in annual revenue, McCarthy said in a July 2025 interview.

• Processing
• Business-to-business payments services
• Marketing data

Checks represent roughly 2.5% of United States consumer transactions, though businesses and government bodies continue to use them.

“We are using our legacy in paper payments to build a large digital payments & data business,” McCarthy told Payments Dive.