Opn Enters US Payments Market With $400M MerchantE Deal

Japanese FinTech unicorn Opn has entered the American payments market with its purchase of MerchantE, a B2B digital commerce platform.

“With the acquisition, Opn’s global footprint now spans seven countries, including the U.S., the largest growing market for embedded finance solutions,” the company announced Tuesday (Nov. 15) in a press release on its website.

The company did not release a dollar figure for the acquisition, although Reuters reported the sale price was around $400 million.

Based in Alpharetta, Georgia, MerchantE provides medium-sized and enterprise businesses with payment processing capabilities to facilitate transactions.

“MerchantE’s robust backend technology strongly complements Opn’s one-stop online payment and digital transformation solutions,” the release stated.

Together, the two companies have processed more than $19 billion in payments for over 20,000 businesses so far this year, according to the release.

Once known as SYNQA, Tokyo-based Opn renamed itself following a $120 million funding round earlier this year that made it one of Japan’s few “unicorns,” a term for a startup valued at $1 billion or higher.

“Our acquisition of MerchantE represents a transformative step in Opn’s journey to becoming a truly global digital finance platform, underscoring our commitment to making payments seamless and borderless for both people and businesses,” Opn Founder and CEO Jun Hasegawa said in the Tuesday release.

The partnership comes as the embedded finance world is offering companies a greenfield opportunity, PYMNTS noted last week in a conversation with a group of payments experts.

The current B2B experience is dominated by a “swivel chair” existence that means pivoting between a host of screens, software programs and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (not to mention emails and even faxes) to accomplish tasks. Make a mistake — and with manual tasks mistakes do get made — and things get expensive.

Platforms, the executives told PYMNTS, are vital in streamlining integrations and embedding solutions into customer relationship management software so businesses can spend more time focusing on core operations.

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