EML Payments has confirmed an agreement to acquire Sentenial, significantly enhancing its focus on open banking. 

The deal has been signed for an upfront enterprise value of €70 million (A$108.6 million), plus an earn-out component of up to €40 million (A$62.1 million).

Sentenial is a cloud-native, API-first, full-stack enterprise-grade payments company, processing €45 billion per annum and is dually regulated in the United Kingdom and France.

Tom Cregan, EML’s Managing Director & Group CEO, stated: “EML has transitioned over the years from primarily a gift-card company to a company with a diverse revenue base across multiple prepaid products. 

“The acquisition of Sentenial will be the next evolution for EML, as we transition into a broader payments business by adding instant account-to-account (Open Banking) payments into our suite of solutions for current and prospective customers.

“EML supports thousands of prepaid programmes globally, and our platform is how our customers interact with us. Sentenial operates an enterprise-grade payments platform processing over €45 billion per annum, and is, therefore, a similar business to EML but servicing a different customer set with different payment types. 

“The net result of bringing the companies together allows EML to increase our Total Addressable Market by expanding our product suite, and we see a number of opportunities to cross-sell Account to Account payments into existing EML customers, and vice versa.

“Sentenial is a European business today, and we will be working to extend its platform to our other regions in the coming 12-18 months.

“Sean and the team have attracted an extraordinary calibre of international clients who trust its innovative products range, and the entire EML family looks forward to welcoming the Sentenial team, which is currently comprised of 60 full-time employees. Geographically, with its principal office in Ireland and offices located in London, Paris, Brussels and Krakow, Sentenial fits well with EML.”

Sentenial, and its Open Banking brand Nuapay, have established a strengthened footprint in the fast-growing European Open Banking sector, which provides EML with the capabilities to manage payments across scheme (Mastercard and Visa) and non-scheme (A2A), as well as both card and non-card payments.

Sean Fitzgerald, Founder and CEO at Sentenial, added: “Nuapay’s mission is to be the best way to pay and get paid. We are proud to have developed a market-leading Account-to-Account and Open Banking payments platform over nearly two decades in business. 

“The revolution in payments caused by Open Banking and Real-Time Payments is rapidly building momentum globally, and we are hugely excited by this opportunity to move to a global scale as part of EML. From the moment EML approached us, we’ve been impressed by their vision, ambition and growing ecosystem.”