Fifth Third Bank has acquired Arlington, Virginia-based embedded payments platform Rize Money, the bank announced Monday.
The annual revenue of Fifth Third’s embedded payments is expected to pass $130 million this year, and the bank said acquiring Rize will support that growth as well as the bank’s treasury management businesses.
“This acquisition is another example of Fifth Third’s commitment to leveraging technology and innovation for the benefit of our clients,” Bridgit Chayt, Fifth Third’s head of wholesale payments, said in a prepared statement. “The addition of Rize Money enhances our existing embedded payments offerings and positions us to meet our clients’ ever-changing needs.”
The bank has made several fintech acquisitions in recent years, including healthcare fintechs Provide in 2021 and Big Data Healthcare this year, as well as sustainability-focused point-of-sale lender Dividend Finance in 2022.
The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
A spokesperson for Fifth Third told Banking Dive that the entities had been in discussions around a deal for months. It officially closed in early May, the spokesperson said.
“[T]he Embedded Payments team at Fifth Third have been quietly building what is already perhaps the largest embedded finance practice in the industry, and bringing Rize into the fold will help kick that torrid growth into even higher gear,” Rize CEO Justin Howell said on his LinkedIn page. “The combination of Rize’s technology with Fifth Third’s scale will create an API-driven, fully compliant technology platform unmatched in the embedded finance and banking space to help non-banks seamlessly integrate financial capabilities into their product offerings.”
Howell said he and his co-founders started Rize “with a vision to bridge the gap between how customers think about and use money in their daily lives and the opaque, highly regulated world of financial services.”
“Our goal was to break down the barriers between various financial siloes and enable financial user experiences that were simple and intuitive,” he said. “From our first conversation, it was clear that [Fifth Third Embedded Payments General Manager Tom Bianco] and the Embedded Payments team at Fifth Third shared that vision, and we could not have found a better set of partners to make that vision a reality together at the scale and level of impact that we have always dreamed about.”
Howell did not say whether or not he would have a role at Fifth Third following the deal.
