Private Equity Investing in Financial Technology

A community for discussing investments made in financial technology providers by the venture capital and private equity community.

Retired Member 

How will the Durbin Swipe Bill affect payments in the U.S.

The 2008 $48 billion VISA and Mastercard interchange fees that Senator Durbin mentions all throughout his bill is as a result of $2.864 trillion of VISA and MC debit and credit card charges. What this means is that the average interchange fee is a very reasonable 1.676%. Senator Durbin also mentions that the the U.S. interchange fee is the highes...

25 May 2010 /payments

Retired Member 

An American Dream and the hard life of an entrepreneur

In the early 90's my employer, the phone company in California spent over $50000.00 to send me to get certified to be a Systems and Application Developer, specializing in mainframe. This, after I paid for my own college education. A couple of years later, the phone company wanted to trim its staff and offered 'early out' packages. I took this since...

03 February 2010 /regulation

Retired Member 

Mastercard acquires Orbiscom - a validation ?

As the inventor of the PATENTED system (6931382 USPTO) that enables cardholders to set their own user limits for their real card accounts, this validates all the work I have done to design and create this patented system. ORBISCOM's patents (tagged as 6636833 and 7136835 USPTO) are clearly limited to what they call 'limited use' card numbers which...

08 January 2009 /security

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

As cool as ICE

The Creditex acquisition looks like third-time lucky for ICE, which has been keen to follow the same horizontal growth strategy being successfully pursued by other exchange groups over the past few years. Vertically, it has already this month received permission to expand into European clearing, with the FSA approving the operations of ICE Clear Eu...

03 June 2008 /wholesale

Retired Member 

PE and Fintech: Finding Each Other At Last

I recently came across a report from TowerGroup entitled "Private Equity and Financial Technology Vendors: Finding Each Other at Last" published by Stephen Bruel last July. In his report, Mr. Bruel estimates that 2.8% of all private equity transactions between 2005 and Q107 were in the financial technology companies, representing $33 bi...

26 November 2007

Retired Member 

Opportunities in FinTech Localization

The globalization of financial services is accelerating rapidly, particularly in the emerging and pre-emerging market spaces. As the financial systems of G7 nations continue to evolve, these markets will need to undertake significant financial infrastructure reforms in order to achieve and maintain connectivity to the global economy. Chief among t...

20 November 2007

Retired Member 

Successful Private Equity Exit on SmartStream

As you may have seen, SmartStream, a leader in trade reconciliation and STP solutions for financial institutions, was acquired by DIFC Investments. Due to various confidentiality agreements, I cannot comment too much on this transaction but this was a very successful investment for us which furthermore demonstrates our strong track record in the ...

14 November 2007

Retired Member 

Investments in the Risk Management software sector

The most significant private equity investment in the financial technology sector these past few months was definitely Advent International's (a TA Associates competitor and spin-off) acquisition of a majority stake in Paris-based portfolio and risk management software provider Sophis last July. Sophis provides two main solutions: RISQUE (for sell...

22 October 2007 /regulation