Dive Brief:
- Global payments processor Fiserv has acquired independent sales organization The LR2 Group for $26 million, according to its most recent 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
- Brookfield, Wisconsin-based Fiserv said it purchased the company, which does business as The City POS, on June 1. All 11 employees of the Santa Rosa, California-based LR2 will be retained, said Ann Cave, a Fiserv spokesperson.
- The City POS, which offers payment processing and point-of-sale services, “is included within the Acceptance segment and expands the reach of [Fiserv’s] merchant services business,” the filing said.
Dive Insight:
The City POS was founded in 2003, according to its website. The company “has been a key ISO partner of Fiserv for over a decade,” Cave said in an email.
Fiserv has made a slew of acquisitions in the last two years: It purchased Finxact for $650 million in February, and acquired BentoBox, NetPay, Integrity Payments, SpendLabs, Pineapple Payments, Radius8 and Ondot all in 2021, according to the filing.
The fact that the acquisition of The City POS came with little fanfare from the company – it wasn’t mentioned during Fiserv’s second-quarter earnings conference call with analysts – is probably because it’s on the small side, making up about .1% or .2% of revenue, said Dave Koning, analyst with financial firm Baird.
With acquisitions, however, there are also integration costs. Fiserv’s big 2019 acquisition of First Data required significant integration. In its wake, the company recorded $95 million in employee termination costs last year, $131 million in 2020 and $32 million in 2019, according to its most recent 10-K filing with the SEC in February.
As it continued to digest the slew of purchases, Fiserv cut employees and shouldered higher severance expenses in the first half of this year, too.
