Amex Buys Virtual Currency Firm Sometrics for $30M

American Express has purchased Sometrics, a company that facilitates payments within electronic games using virtual currency, in a deal worth $30 million, the company confirmed Tuesday.

Sometrics will be used to bolster Serve, American Express's digital payments platform, the company said.

Jason Hogg, the president of Amex's Serve Enterprises unit, said it bought Sometrics partly as "an intellectual capital investment. We were impressed with the management team."

In the last year, American Express has partnered with Foursquare, Facebook and Zynga to help build its social payments business.

Founded in 2007, Sometrics announced in July that company had seen more than 3.3 trillion individual units of currency processed through its payment platform.

Amex's purchase of the company was first reported Tuesday by the website TechCrunch.