PayU, a Hoofddorp, The Netherlands-based online payment service provider, acquired ZOOZ, an Israeli payments technology platform.
The amount of the deal was not disclosed.
The deal, which brings PayU’s total sum of investments and acquisitions in global fintech to more than $350 million since it began a series of strategic moves across the globe in 2016 to open access to financial services, will support the company’s ongoing expansion into high growth markets.
The ZOOZ and PayU teams will work together to create a global standard payments infrastructure. As part of this vision, they will build a modular and flexible ‘Payment OS platform’ that can support evolving merchant and broader payment industry needs.
The platform’s immediately expected features include fraud management and real time reporting or smart routing, to better aid global merchant growth.
The deal follows a partnership which gave PayU merchants such as Gett and Kiwi.com access to 2.3 billion new customers across high growth markets via the ZOOZ-designed PayU Hub platform. It leverages PayU’s payments infrastructure and ZOOZ’s technology to open up access to new markets for merchants with global aspirations and sets a new standard for payments across borders.
Led by Laurent le Moal, CEO, PayU is an online payment service provider delivering financial services in Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The company has more than 1,800 payment specialists based in these local markets supporting 300,000+ merchants and the millions of consumers making online payments.
It is part of Naspers, a global Internet and entertainment group. Following completion of the deal, due to close summer 2018, ZOOZ will be wholly owned by Naspers, strengthening its Payments division and supporting its strategy to grow its financial services presence across emerging markets with long-term growth potential.
As part of the deal, ZOOZ’s co-founder and CEO Oren Levy and CTO Ronen Morecki will become part of PayU’s Global Leadership team, focusing on tech and business development. The company’s team of 70 technical and payments experts will also become part of the PayU team, boosting the business’ technical capabilities.
To date, ZOOZ has raised $35m in four rounds of financing from investors including Rhodium, lool Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Target Global and X/Seed Capital with participation of angels such as Eilan Tirosh.
FinSMEs
23/07/2018