Dive Brief:

• Digital commerce company NCR Voyix recently sold a set of assets related to the company’s payments business for $82 million, according to its third-quarter filing.
• The assets sold Oct. 19 primarily included merchant contracts, Voyix’s front-end authorization platform “and certain relevant intellectual property,” according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That collection of assets was “deemed non-strategic” to Voyix’s payments business, the Nov. 14 filing said.
• Following NCR’s October split into two publicly-traded companies, Voyix focuses on retail, restaurant and digital banking services while NCR Atleos offers ATM services. “In our effort to focus, we decided this is a really good time to divest” of the payments assets, NCR Voyix CEO David Wilkinson said during a Stephens investor conference presentation Nov. 16.

Dive Insight:

The divestiture included “contracts and customers in verticals that were part of an acquisition that NCR made of some payment capabilities,” Wilkinson said during the conference presentation. A spokesperson for the company didn’t immediately identify which acquisition Wilkinson was referring to, or who the buyer was. 

There were “very concentrated sets of customers in non-core verticals” that presented renewal risk and required investment, Wilkinson said. 

For the first three quarters of the year, the payments business that was sold generated $33 million in revenue, the company filing said. 

Wilkinson defended the divestiture price tag, noting some might wonder why the company sold those assets for so little. “We didn’t,” he said. “We ran a full process on that. So I assure you, we maximized the amount that the market would pay for those assets.” The price speaks to the non-strategic nature of that portfolio, he added.

The sale “had nothing to do with our ability to attach payments to retail and restaurant,” Wilkinson asserted. The company has started to add payment capabilities to its Aloha restaurant point-of-sale bundle, rather than routing payments to a separate processor.

Expanding that is a “critical part” of the company’s strategy, he said. “We lead with that in the (small and medium-sized business) space, so we’re 90% attached in that SMB world in restaurants, we’re expanding into the enterprise side of restaurant, and then we’ll start to get capabilities in retail.” Voyix’s Aloha competes with Oracle’s Micros, fintech Toast and a number of other rivals in the restaurant arena. 

With the split, former NCR CEO Michael Hayford retired in October, according to a news release. Hayford had been with the company since 2018. Tim Oliver, former NCR CFO and senior executive vice president, is now president and CEO of NCR Atleos.