VeriFone To Buy European Payment Provider Point

VeriFone Systems Inc. is buying European payment and gateway services provider Point, the terminal maker announced Nov. 14.

VeriFone said it would pay about $825 million to Nordic Capital Fund V, which owns Point. It also would retire about $234 million in Point's debt when the deal closes.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company expects to close the acquisition of the Stockholm-based company by yearend. The acquisition would give VeriFone about 475,000 additional merchant contracts across 11 Northern European countries.

The acquisition is meant to fuel VeriFone's support of alternative payment forms.

"Our vision is to offer retailers everywhere a managed service to easily accept all existing payment types, including the evolving alternative and mobile-payment methods being offered by Google, PayPal, Groupon, Isis, Visa, MasterCard and American Express," Douglas G. Bergeron, VeriFone's chief executive, said in a press release. "At the same time, we can increasingly offer the new payment entrants easy and accelerated access to our worldwide installation of more than 20 million merchant lanes."

VeriFone bought part of its rival Hypercom Corp. of Scottsdale, Ariz., in August (see story).  Private equity firm Gores Group LLC, which owned VeriFone from 2001 to 2005, picked up Hypercom’s U.S. terminal business and last month changed the company’s name to Equinox Payments LLC (see story).