Spanish Banking Group Sabadell Considers Selling Payments Business

Banco de Sabadell will be looking into selling its payments business, Bloomberg reported Friday (Feb. 11), citing anonymous sources.

The Spanish banking group is looking into this with an adviser, and the report said it might get somewhere between €250 million to €350 million ($284 million to $397 million).

While there’s no concrete decision yet and the sale may not happen, the report notes that Sabadell has been trying to sell some operations since a merger with its bigger Spanish rival, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, collapsed in 2020 over price.

Since then, Sabadell has been looking to focus on retail banking at home and offload its international assets to the U.K., where it owns TSB Bank.

The payments business for Sabadell processes credit and debit card transactions. A sale would add to the $157 billion in deals that targeted the European financial industry in the past year, according to Bloomberg data.

In late 2020, Sabadell was reported to be looking into cutting jobs and making distribution deals with other European banks after the talks with BBVA didn’t work out.

Read more: Spanish Bank Sabadell Resets After Failed BBVA Merger

The shares fell in the wake of that, and there were also investor concerns as Sabadell was hit with bad loans because of the economic crisis.

Sabadell said at the time that it was planning to focus more on working in its home region. It said its leadership in serving smaller businesses in Spain would make it a “highly profitable solid domestic franchise,” saying that it planned to focus on market segments that were more profitable and added more value.

According to two sources, the company was planning to cut around 2,000 jobs in Spain in 2021, on top of the 1,800 it had announced at the time.