IBM buys digital payments company Expertus Technologies

IBM has announced it has acquired Montreal-based fintech company, Expertus Technologies in a bid to bolster its digital payments portfolio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Expertus was founded in 2001 and offers a cloud-based payments platform to more than 1,000 customers including banks, credit unions, regulatory agencies, and corporates worldwide. It processes over $50 billion daily on its payments platform and is one of the largest North American services bureaus of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions (SWIFT).

IBM said that the acquisition brings decades of consulting experience on payment modernisation to the company. It added that the consulting and business process services opportunity in banking and financial markets over the next few years could be worth as much as $100 billion.

The deal builds on last month's acquisition of SAP consulting partner TruQua, which bolstered IBM Global Business Services' cloud application modernisation and finance transformation expertise.

Expertus will now become part of IBM Global Business Services, following its previous successful alliance with IBM Payments Center Canada. IBM will consolidate Expertus' Payments Platform as a Service offering and build on SWIFT processing services and capabilities, which enable a global network of 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries to send and receive information about financial transactions.

Together with Expertus, IBM can now provide financial institutions with intelligent workflows, end-to-end business processes embedded with AI, data, and analytics, “transforming payments and treasury management on the cloud with real-time data, easy to use interfaces and improved pricing by reducing cost per transaction”.

"Financial institutions must balance greater demand for secure digital solutions while complying with rapidly evolving regulation," said Mark Foster, senior vice president of IBM Services.

"Expertus' payment as a-service solution expands our hybrid cloud-based payments offerings, transforming payments, and treasury management with AI to give financial institutions the flexibility to rapidly innovate and stay competitive as consumer demands evolve."

"IBM and Expertus' long-standing partnership is a great foundation upon which to deepen our relationship," added Jacques Leblanc, CEO, and founder of Expertus. "As a home-grown Montréal company, we are proud to bring our offering as well as our commitment to customers to a new level and a broader market."