Deutsche Bank, Fiserv team up in German market

Dive Brief:

Mega payments processor Fiserv and Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest lender, are locking arms in a joint venture to offer card and digital payment acceptance services to merchants in that country, the two companies jointly said Monday in a release.
They will target small and midsize businesses as clients, with a few thousand to start, and an eventual target clientele of about 800,000, the two companies said.
The new venture will use Fiserv's cloud-based Clover point-of-sale software, a unit that saw a 36% surge in payment volume last year compared with 2019.

Dive Insight:

Brookfield, Wisconsin-based Fiserv has been building up Clover ever since it acquired the business as part of its 2019 purchase of First Data. That combination made Fiserv the fifth-largest U.S. merchant payment acquirer last year, based on card transaction volume, according to research from the Nilson Report.

Now, Clover is helping to expand Fiserv internationally as it builds a presence in Europe's largest economy. Clover's hardware and software technology lets small and midsize merchants accept payments, process transactions, use online ordering, offer e-commerce brands, and use customer loyalty tools.

Meanwhile, the joint venture allows Deutsche Bank a route back into payments processing after abandoning the market in 2012, when it sold its payments processing business to Atlanta-based Evo Payments International, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Fiserv is facilitating Deutsche Bank's re-entry at a time when the payments industry is on fire, with new fintechs attracting billions of dollars in investments to create new systems for payments channels between businesses and consumers, and in other areas. The business-consumer payment channel became particularly attractive over the past year as the COVID-19 pandemic increased online transactions and boosted consumer acceptance of digital payment channels.

"Together with Deutsche Bank, we will be able to help small and mid-sized enterprises in Germany do business in new ways, bringing them a compelling combination of solutions and services to streamline their payment acceptance and banking capabilities," said John Gibbons, the executive vice president who leads operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Fiserv. “We look forward to bringing new solutions to merchants as they continue to advance their payment acceptance capabilities to meet changing customer expectations in a rapidly evolving post-COVID world."

Fiserv partnered with payments company PayPal in April in a move that lets Clover users accept payments via PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo's mobile option. Consumers can scan a merchant QR code and use their digital wallet apps to make in-person purchases and receive electronic receipts without touching merchant equipment.

Fiserv has also been buying smaller fintechs to strengthen its hand in the increasingly competitive market fueled by the upstarts' innovations. Fiserv's acquisitions over the past year included purchases of Ondot, Pineapple Payments and Radius8.