Payroc WorldAccess, one of the biggest non-bank payments processing companies in the U.S., just keeps getting bigger. 

Last month, the suburban Chicago company made its biggest acquisition yet, forking over $440 million in cash to buy the payments side of publicly-traded company i3 Verticals. (Payroc didn’t buy its software business.)

Tinley Park, Illinois-based Payroc is now circling about $500 million in annual revenue, including the latest merger, and has about 1,200 employees, Adam Oberman, the company’s president, said in an interview on Tuesday. The company shed about 15 workers as part of the i3 Verticals transaction, he said.

While it will take about a year to swallow the i3 Verticals business, Payroc doesn’t plan to slow the momentum of its acquisition strategy, Oberman said. 

“We're not taking our foot off the pedal,” he said in the interview. “We're going to do a larger capital call for the investors, and raise more money that way, to do some of these acquisitions.”

The company has about 50 potential target acquisitions in its sights, and is “really looking at” about eight, he explained.

Payroc has been on an acquisition spree since about 2018, rolling up independent software vendors and other smaller players to become the fourth-largest non-bank processor, according to Oberman. Earlier this year, Payroc also said it would purchase SterlingCard Payment Solutions, a Canadian company that provides payments software for retail and e-commerce use.

Payroc now sits just behind the industry’s three largest rivals, including Fiserv, Fidelity National Information Services, aka FIS, and Global Payments, but it has leap-frogged Paysafe, North American Bancard, Priority Technology and Shift4 in terms of merchant volume, he contended. That’s still just three to five percent of the overall market, though, because the big three own such large shares, he explained.

The i3 Verticals deal has a long history. Some eight years ago, i3 Verticals CEO Greg Daily, who is “very good friends” with Oberman’s father, Payroc CEO Jim Oberman, tried to buy Payroc, the younger Oberman said. But that didn’t happen.

Fast-forward to this year, and Payroc was interested in buying the i3 Verticals payments assets. At first the premium was too high, so Payroc declined, he said. But because i3 Verticals had to do a deal to pay off debt and wanted as many of its 275 employees’ jobs to be preserved as possible, it ultimately worked out an agreement with Payroc, he explained.

In any case, all of Payroc’s growth is ultimately leading toward taking the company public, he said. 

“Our ambitions are to go [for an] IPO in the future,” he said, though he said he doesn’t know if that’s in the next year, or five years, or another timeframe. 

Still, Oberman hedged on that possibility. “It may not even happen,” Oberman said of an IPO. “We're not focused on IPO, or selling or getting acquired, or recapitalizing or merging. We're focused on growing now. That's our main goal."

Helping to call the shots will be Parthenon Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns 46% of Payroc now, and will increase its ownership to 50% with completion of the i3 Verticals transaction, Oberman said. 

“We will start preparing, I'd say, within the next year, at least getting out there to test the waters,” Oberman said of a potential IPO. “It's just not ready for Payroc to do anything today because we're still building. We're still growing.”

In a follow-up statement, the company reiterated that an IPO is not a certainty. “While the future holds a variety of possibilities, Payroc is continuing what [it] does best: delivering seamless, custom payment experiences,” the company said.