InComm Inc. has announced its purchase of Coinstar Inc.'s electronic payment services operations.
The deal came Thursday, less than a month after InComm bought the social networking gift card provider GroupCard.
The $40 million deal includes Coinstar's prepaid card portfolio, which includes about 400 prepaid card products from more than 65 issuers.
The purchase "allows us to add offerings that will contribute to the depth of our products," Scott Meyerhoff, InComm's chief financial officer, said in an interview.
The acquisition, though not a massive one in terms of price, is significant because it speaks to the consolidation happening in the prepaid card-distribution space, according to Gwenn Bezard, a co-founder and research director at Aite Group.
Coinstar trailed InComm and Blackhawk Network in prepaid distribution, according to Bezard. "It's clearly a win for InComm and a loss for Blackhawk," he said, in terms of adding distribution. (Blackhawk did not respond to requests to comment.)
InComm has made several recent deals to expand. In April it agreed to buy QPay Inc., which sells payment-processing systems that let carriers collect in-person payments for wireless services; the price was not disclosed. InComm in March bought Zeevex Inc., which supplies virtual gaming prepaid cards.
InComm will continue to monitor the market, but has no particular hole to fill now, Meyerhoff said. "We need to be disciplined" about further deals, he said.
