Dive Brief:

• Integrated payments provider Shift4, which caters to restaurant, stadium and hotel clients, said Thursday it acquired point-of-sale software firm Focus POS for $45 million in early April.
• Allentown, Pennsylvania-based Shift4 had chased Focus POS as an acquisition target “for more than five years,” said Shift4 CEO Jared Isaacman during a Thursday conference call with analysts to discuss the company’s first-quarter earnings. Shift4 will move the point-of-sale company away from one-time hardware and software sales to focus on software and payments services instead, Isaacman said.
• Boerne, Texas-based Focus POS has about 10,000 restaurant clients across the U.S. that collectively handle about $15 billion in payment volume, according to Shift4’s first-quarter shareholder letter.

Dive Insight:

Focus POS, which serves food and beverage chains such as Denny’s, Arby’s, Popeye’s, Cold Stone Creamery and Topgolf, is “an asset we’ve been after for a while that we really like,” Shift4 President Taylor Lauber told analysts during the call.

The Focus POS business doesn’t have a direct payment processing capability and instead relies on several other vendors, including Shift4, Isaacman said. Focus POS already had an existing software integration with Shift4, “which allows us to work very, very quickly,” he said.

With that acquisition, Shift4 plans to take on payment processing for those merchants and eventually migrate them to Shift4’s restaurant point-of-sale platform, SkyTab, Isaacman said.

This approach “represents a very low-cost way to acquire established, high-quality integrated payment restaurant customers,” Isaacman added. 

It's the latest acquisition for Shift4, which last September bought European payment service provider Online Payments Group for $125.9 million. Shift4 also snapped up six other companies in the third quarter of last year, including three restaurant technology firms. And in March last year, Shift4 announced it was buying Finaro, a Tel Aviv-based financial services firm for $525 million. 

Shift4 continues to await European regulatory approval of its purchase of financial services firm Finaro, which is expected to close within the next three months, Isaacman said.

As for the first-quarter results, Shift4 reported net income of $20.4 million, compared to a $13.2 million loss the same quarter last year, according to the shareholder letter. The company’s gross revenue climbed 36% to $547 million.