From bank-owned cost center to independent European payments champion
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STATUS
Active
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Year
2015
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LOCATION
Milan
KEY TRANSACTION DETAILS
- 2022 Combination with SIA and Nets
- 2019 IPO on MTA Borsa Italiana
- 2015 Investment (Bain Capital Private Equity)
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
The leading provider of payment services (acquiring, issuing and processing, clearing and depository bank) originally only in Italy and now across Europe
2.2M
Merchants work with Nexi
1,000+
Financial institutions across Europe work with Nexi
170M
Cards have transactions facilitated by Nexi
THE BAIN CAPITAL ADVANTAGE AT WORK
The creation of Nexi, Europe’s largest payments platform, had its roots in Bain Capital’s 2009 foray into European payments with the carve-out of WorldPay from Royal Bank of Scotland and the 2014 acquisition from Nordic banks of Nets.
Both of those highly complex transactions paved the way for Nexi, a payment service co-owned by a group of Italian banks who, until Bain Capital’s involvement, had been running the business unit mainly as a cost center.
What followed was Nexi doubling in size due to organic and inorganic growth initiatives pursued by Bain Capital, including several key acquisitions in the fragmented Italian payments market. In aggregate, over the 2 years following the original 2015 acquisition, Bain Capital and co-investors approximately doubled the capital overall invested in the platform through M&A.
Bain Capital, our partners, and the management team established Nexi as a truly independent, profitable growth business thanks to a significant investment in its technology infrastructure. Also important was the investment in new product development and operational transformation, facilitated by our deep pool of portfolio group resources and the know-how developed with WorldPay and Nets.
Nexi went public on Italy’s MTA stock market in 2019. Illustrating Bain Capital’s ability to navigate private, public and the broader capital markets, we facilitated Nexi’s most important mergers after the company was publicly listed. In 2021 and early 2022, Nexi finalized its combination with payment companies SIA and Nets, turning Nexi into a pan-European payments leader and merging the growth trajectory of two Bain Capital-backed success stories.
Bain Capital invested hundreds of millions in Nexi to improve its technology, making the company more scalable, in consolidation through M&A to improve the competitive position, and in product innovation (organically and via M&A) to improve its value proposition to customers. These initiatives drove a step change in performance of the business that ultimately resulted in a highly successful IPO.
