Dive Brief:

• Payments technology provider Stax has purchased payment solutions provider Atlantic-Pacific Processing Systems to create an end-to-end payment processing platform, according to a Tuesday press release.
• Las Vegas-based APPS provides payments software for tasks such as payment processing and managing chargebacks. All of the company’s roughly 50 employees will join Stax, with APPS CEO Abe Maghaguian becoming Stax’s chief payment officer, the release said. Orlando-based Stax declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal.
• In addition to its Las Vegas headquarters, APPS has offices in Fountain Valley, California and Louisville, Kentucky. All of those offices will remain open, Maghaguian said in an email.

Dive Insight:

A spokesperson for Stax declined to comment on the timing of the acquisition, but at least one APPS executive, Chief Operating Officer Sarah Gerald, noted being a part of Stax as of this month on her LinkedIn profile. She is now COO of processing at Stax, according to her profile.

The acquisition occurs as more companies seek to be a one-stop shop in providing payments services to corporate customers, Maghaguian noted in the release.

APPS provides services to about 150,000 merchants, according to the company’s website. It lists card giant Visa and software company Intuit among its partners.

APPS’s payment processing platform has been rebranded as Stax Processing, seeking to offer services to independent software vendors, independent sales organizations, payment facilitators and small to medium-sized businesses, the release said. The new platform will offer improved data reporting and the ability for customization, according to the release.

Those offerings fit into the strategy set by Stax’s new CEO Paulette Rowe, who has set her sights on embedded payments, the practice of building payment functionality directly into business management software. 

“If you’re a smaller company, you don’t necessarily have the time or want to take the time to really understand the complications of the payments world,” Rowe told Payments Dive in an interview last month.

The acquisition is the latest in an October spurt of payments mergers and acquisitions. Near the beginning of the month, payments company Shift4 Payments purchased competitor SpotOn’s sports and entertainment business unit. In the past week, payment processor Fiserv said it acquired Brazilian company Skytef, and NMI, a payments technology company, announced its acquisition of the commercial division of Sphere, a payments software provider.

Stax plans to offer new services based on the APPS deal this quarter, with a full integration and new offerings continuing through the end of next year, the release said. “Through the acquisition of APPS, we have heightened our innovation capabilities and technology position, allowing us to create a bespoke payment experience,” Rowe said in the release.