Banking, finance, and taxes

Paya Emerges from SPAC/Merger as the #6 Player in E-Commerce

Jon C. Ogg

Published: October 19, 2020 1:43 pm

Last Updated: October 20, 2020 8:05 am

The financial world has seen more than a fair number of specialty purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) come public in 2020. This is allowing a vast number of transactions to take place outside of traditional M&A and outside of traditional initial public offerings. One SPAC which has just closed on acquisition with a successful stock debut is FinTech Acquisition Corp. III (NASDAQ: PAYA), which is now Paya Holdings Inc.

Paya is an integrated payments and commerce solution provider, and the company is led by CEO Jeff Hack who will be remaining to drive its growth strategy going forward. Paya’s existing majority shareholder GTCR is a private equity investor and the company did specify that GTCR will remain its largest stockholder.

The Paya Connect platform is said to combine card, ACH and check acceptance and the company has previously noted strength in the municipal, utility, healthcare, not-for-profit, and education sectors.

Paya has also noted that it has seen growth acceleration within its key industry verticals during COVID-19 and it closed on the acquisition of The Payments Group (TPG) on October 1, 2020, for integrated payments solutions to more than 600 local governments, municipalities and courts.

Paya is one of those companies that may be known in the fintech industry, but many people will not have heard of it because it’s one of those companies that operates the technology that many users may have used without ever knowing it. That said, the company claims to process over $30 Billion of annual payment volume across credit card, debit card, ACH, and checks.

According to the company’s own claims, that puts it within the top 20 payment processing provider in the US and puts it ranked as number-6 overall in e-commerce with more than 100,000 customers through over 2,000 key distribution partners

Shares of Paya are still listed as FinTech Acquisition Corp. III on some quote systems as of Monday, October 19, but the name-change has now occurred since the operating company merger has closed and the old trading data was under the Nasdaq ticker FTAC in quote systems.

The last trade was up over 7% at $12.60 on Monday afternoon, and the FTAC quote data showed that its shares closed up over 3% at $11.37 on Friday ahead of what was billed as a $1.3 billion merger. Its pre-merger trading range had been $9.75 to $12.25.