OFX Buys Canadian FX Firm Firma for $70M

International money service provider OFX Group Limited has announced an agreement to acquire Firma, a global foreign exchange service, a press release says.

The sale will go forward for $98 million.

Firma is based in Edmonton, Canada and was founded in 1998. The company services corporate clients and had 194 employees as of Sept. 30, 2021.

Firma’s work involves spot and market orders, multi-currency accounts, payments and mass payments and forward contracts.

Skander Malcolm, OFX CEO and managing director, said the Firma buy was its first major acquisition and would help it with expansion.

“Firma generates strong earnings from a high-quality customer base and has an excellent service culture, so there is a lot of alignment with OFX. By bringing our businesses together we become a much bigger corporate specialist with a strong recurring revenue base and considerable growth opportunities.”

Malcolm said the business is doing well and has seen positive trends going into the third quarter.

By adding Firma, he said the company would be able to boost growth, combining infrastructure and risk culture with Firma’s customer base and “service excellence.”

PYMNTS writes that although cross-border merchants are picking up local payment options more often now, there could still be more, according to Citcoin founder and CEO Chuck Huang.

Read more: Know Where Your Customer Is: Key to Improving Cross-Border Merchant Sales

PYMNTS notes there are over 450 local digital payment methods used around the world, with the deciding factor for success often coming down to how well they expand internationally.

Huang told PYMNTS that there was still plenty of card-based, traditional usage going on. The issue is that many countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, have low credit card penetration rates — below 10% sometimes.

But Alipay has a 90% to 100% rate of penetration in China and close to that number in other markets. He said that only supporting card-based schemes could still result in many people being unable to pay.