Dive Brief:
- American Express said Friday it has agreed to buy the reservation and event management platform Tock and the mobile payments platform Rooam, according to a press release from the company.
- Amex bought Tock from New York-based website builder Squarespace for $400 million, a spokesperson for the card company said by email. Chicago-based Tock operates a restaurant and hotel reservation system and an event management tool.
- Rooam, which is based in Washington, D.C., is a contactless payment platform that provides point of sale services to merchants.
Dive Insight:
The Amex spokesperson declined to disclose the value of the deal to acquire Rooam.
Squarespace paid $400 million to acquire Tock in 2021, according to Bloomberg.
The acquisition of Tock is subject to purchase price adjustments, the spokesperson said, but the credit card company is focused on closing the deal as quickly as possible.
Amex expects the Rooam deal to close by the end of the year, the spokesperson added.
Restaurant spending accounted for $100 billion worth of spending on American Express cards in 2023, making it one of the company’s largest spending categories, Amex’s president of U.S. consumer services, Howard Grosfield, said in a news release.
That figure is poised to grow larger. In February, the National Restaurant Association forecast $1 trillion in restaurant sales across the United States in 2024. That figure would be the largest total the organization has ever recorded.
