Dive Brief:

• Payment processor Fiserv has acquired Brazilian company Skytef, Fiserv said Wednesday. Skytef offers payment tools such as electronic funds transfer solutions and point-of-sale machines, according to the company’s LinkedIn profile. 
• With the acquisition of Skytef, Fiserv expands its strategic partner network in Brazil to about 1,000, according to a news release. The acquisition adds about 600 independent software vendor partners and about 27,000 merchants in Brazil, Fiserv said.
• Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Skytef, founded in 2002 and headquartered in São Paulo, has between 50 and 200 employees, the company’s LinkedIn page said. The company has about 4,000 customers throughout Brazil.

Dive Insight:

The acquisition of Skytef, the primary distributor of Fiserv’s smart electronic funds transfer solution in Brazil, brings a Fiserv partner in-house.

Although it’s been less acquisitive this year thus far, Fiserv has been a frequent acquirer in recent years, snapping up companies such as Finxact, BentoBox and Ondot. The company often invests in or partners with a firm and gets to know it well before acquiring the company, Fiserv CEO Frank Bisignano noted during an investor conference appearance in June.

“Since 2002, Skytef has shown itself to be a highly capable distributor, offering our solutions strategically to all Brazilian retail verticals,” said Jorge Valdivia, Fiserv’s general manager for Brazil in the release. “By integrating Skytef into Fiserv, we will bring their best practices and commercial policies to ISV partners and merchants who are part of the Fiserv network.”

A spokesperson for Brookfield, Wisconsin-based Fiserv declined to say how many employees Skytef has, but said all will join Fiserv. 

Bringing Skytef under the Fiserv umbrella is designed to make operations more efficient and expand products and services offered to businesses, Fiserv said. It also better enables Fiserv to serve large clients “with complex after-sales demands,” the release said.

Latin America, particularly Brazil and Argentina, represents a key driver of growth for Fiserv, executives said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call in July. 

Bisignano called Latin America a “standout grower” in recent quarters, and said the company believes the region will remain so long term.

The company pointed to its partnership with state-owned financial services company Caixa Econômica Federal as well as how it’s using Pix, an instant payment scheme backed by Brazil’s central bank, to enable business-to-business payments and other transactions.