Magex will maintain OPT as wholly-owned division and retain the Opticard® brand name. Dave Ingwersen, President of OPT, will become President of Magex's Card Services Division with global oversight of the Card Services business worldwide. The acquisition gives Magex its first fully owned subsidiary in the United States where it sees future growth.

For more than nine years, Open Payment Technologies has been a leader in North America providing stored-value products and electronic payment processing to vertical markets, including retail, hospitality, restaurants and supermarkets. The Opticard® Platform provides retailers with a total electronic stored-value processing solution. Program types include electronic gift, retail merchandise credit, promotional, and loyalty all on a single private label card. OPT also provides customers with efficient front-end services for processing check, debit, credit, ACH, and Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) authorization services. OPT's applications support over 17,000 POS terminals throughout the US and Canada, and serve leading retailers such as Claim Jumper Restaurants, Barbeques Galore, and Books-A-Million.

"Becoming part of Magex is a tremendous opportunity for OPT," said Dave Ingwersen. "Together we will leverage Magex's relationships with European banks, its investors, and other partners to bring European retailers the same high-quality and sales expanding programs that have been so successful in the U.S. and Canada. And with Magex's additional resources we plan on quickly growing the types of stored-value card programs we offer in the US to include healthcare, payroll, insurance claims, and corporate incentives."

"The acquisition of OPT is a natural step for Magex as it grows into other forms of electronic stored-value programs," said Josh Groves, CEO of Magex. "We're enjoying success with the person-to-person services we've deployed for The Royal Bank of Scotland's FastPay service and MasterCard's MoneySend(TM) funds transfer and remittance service. With OPT's capabilities we can now extend our existing services with stored-value cards as well and bring the stored-value card program directly to European customers. Acquiring OPT gives Magex a larger presence in the U.S. where together we will work on winning more of the nearly $100 billion stored-value market as well as distributing Magex's services to US customers."

"OPT and Magex share a vision to build a leading payments infrastructure company that leverages our proven electronic payments platform, specific market knowledge, and business relationships in the US and Europe," said Steven L. Fingerhood, Magex's Chairman. "As businesses increasingly seek reliable and trusted electronic payment solutions, Magex will meet their needs by providing strategic partnerships, offering industry expertise and an increased scope of services. The expansion of Magex, both with its internal growth and active acquisitions strategy, demonstrates our commitment to meet client requirements as the electronic payments infrastructure industry evolves."