Advent International’s takeover of Nuvei for the significant sum of $6.3bn is a development which several business sectors should keep a close eye on.
This was the consensus on the latest episode of SBC Media’s iGaming Daily podcast, featuring contributions from the Payment Expert, SBC News and CasinoBeats.
Nuvei is a varied company, the podcasters remarked, operating in numerous sectors including e-commerce and embedded payments. However, the company’s B2B payments activity in gambling was of particular interest to the podcast guests.
“They have some really big operator clients,” said Ted Orme-Claye. “Kindred, Entian, Flutter, DraftKings, bet365 – these are just some of the companies that have partnered with them over the years, and I know there’s a more extensive list than that.
“They’ve also become increasingly active in the US over the years, and also canada. Of course they’re a Canadian firm, based in Monetra. Ontario is one of the biggest markets at the moment and there’s a lot of speculation as to when another one is going to open up in Canada.”
After building itself up as one of the most prominent payments providers to gambling across multiple markets, the fact that Nuvei was an acquisition target of Advent – a firm which has pursued payments investments in the past – was not a huge surprise to iGaming Daily.
Ted Menmuir of SBC News did note thoroughly that betting and gaming payments is a highly competitive space and Nuvei is not the only company to have been making inroads in this area, far from it.
The podcast evaluated whether or not we can expect Nuvei to perhaps diversify even more and maybe shift away from gambling under following the Advent takeover, a process which will see it delist from the TSX and Nasdaq exchanges.
“People think that the barriers of entry to payments are very low, that could be true, but the maintenance costs of keeping contracts and keeping your main accounts is cutthroat,” Menmuir summarised.
“We talk about gambling as an aggressive market, but payments is x10 in levels of competition. It’s a much, much deeper pool of competitors targeting contracts.”
