Visa, Nets Both Decline To Comment On Potential Acquisition

Nordic payment firm Nets is being considered for possible purchase by Visa and other companies, but neither firm will confirm nor deny the rumored proposition.

The Copenhagen-based private company is a payment provider for over 400,000 merchants across Europe. Visa is said to be interested in acquiring part of the company, people familiar with the discussions told Quartz. Other firms are also rumored to be eyeing a Nets purchase deal.

“We do not comment on market rumors and speculation,” Povl Rasmussen, a spokesperson for Nets, told Quartz in an email.

Visa is likely not interested in buying the entire company, sources told the news outlet. A Visa spokesperson also declined to comment, saying the company doesn’t speak to speculation.

The portion of the Nets business that Visa is potentially considering include the profitable areas of bank-to-bank payments and automatic billing, sources noted.

Visa runs the leading card payment network outside of China, but bank-to-bank transactions are a burden when many payments happen outside its network.

Nets filed an IPO in 2016, but a year later, an alliance of U.S. private equity firms led by Hellman & Friedman took the company private for 33.1 billion Danish kroner ($4.9 billion).

The possible Visa-Nets deal is one of many recent mergers and acquisitions creating disjointed and fragmented platforms in payments. The resulting new companies are often out of sync with what merchants and customers need and want – namely, an integrated payments experience that crosses channels and platforms.