Acquisitions heat up amid competition for small-business payments clients
Summary
Western Union last month sold its cross-border money transfer unit that catered to SMBs for about $910 million to a U.S. private equity group. To that end, the Minneapolis-based bank bought Bento, which sells payment and expense management services to small and midsize businesses and, in 2019, acquired Talech, a software provider that buttresses SMBs point-of-sale systems. San Francisco-based Square is moving well beyond the small plastic reader to develop more financial and banking services, and a slew of other startups have followed. This will allow Western Union to focus not just on consumer-to-consumer money transfers such as remittances but on providing other financial services for the company’s millions of users worldwide, she said. Representatives of the investment firms that bought the unit, Baupost Group and Goldfinch Partners, didn’t respond to requests for comment on their intentions.