Lightspeed to Acquire Restaurant Software Provider Upserve; Mastercard and SumUp Enable Payments from Vehicles: News Roundup

PaymentFacilitator’s News Roundup is a curated mix of the past week’s news and articles from around the web, including company announcements, global payments news, and other coverage and analysis of topics relevant to payment facilitators.

Mergers & Acquisitions

Montreal-based PF Lightspeed is expanding its presence in the restaurant industry by acquiring Upserve, a restaurant management software provider based in Rhode Island. Lightspeed already provides cloud-based POS software for restaurants as well as other types of businesses. The company will pay about $430 million in a deal consisting of cash and stock. From TechCrunch.

Square is expanding the financial services available through its Cash App by acquiring the tax business of Credit Karma. Credit Karma Tax provides a free tax filing service for consumers. The company plans to offer free tax filing to millions of Americans through the service. Square plans to pay $50 million in cash for the business. From Square.

Payment Partnerships

PayPal and Indian PF Razorpay have partnered to enable international payments for small businesses and freelancers. The companies plan to integrate PayPal into Razorpay’s platform so that merchants on the platform will be able to accept payments from customers across 200 markets. From Economic Times.

Mastercard and London-based PF SumUp have partnered to enable small businesses to accept payments directly from their vehicles. The service is aimed at business owners that use commercial vehicles, including food trucks, beverage suppliers and other tradespeople. The new solution is available in Ford vehicles in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the U.K. From Mastercard.

Funding & Valuation

Leading payments provider and PF Stripe is in talks regarding a new funding round, with an eye-popping $70 billion valuation. Talks are in the early stages, but if the valuation holds, that would be nearly double the company’s last valuation of $36 billion, which was from a funding round in April. Such a valuation would make it the most valuable venture-backed company in the U.S. From Bloomberg.

Cashless Shift

As cash usage rapidly declines across Europe, the U.K. is poised to see a shift of 12 billion cash transactions to cards by 2023. According to a report from Accenture, the value of these shifting transactions is expected to be roughly £155 billion. The trend was already in progress but has been accelerated by the pandemic. From AltFi.