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Kuwait sovereign wealth fund invests in Italian ATM operator

Machine, Atm, Cash Machine Creative Commons
BANCOMAT, which has ATMs across Italy and manages payments under the PagoBANCOMAT and BANCOMAT Pay brands, handles more than 2.5 billion payment and withdrawal transactions a year worth about 210 billion euros ($213 billion) in total

Italian fund FSI, the main investors in which include state lender CDP and the sovereign wealth funds of Kuwait and Singapore, has signed a preliminary deal for an investment in payments card and cash machine operator BANCOMAT.

FSI and BANCOMAT have agreed the terms under which FSI is set to invest in BANCOMAT “to sustain investments and accelerate its development alongside its banking shareholders”, they said in a joint statement without disclosing financial details.

The payments sector has been swept up in a wave of mergers and acquisitions as it seeks the financial muscle to keep up with technological advances while contending with the threat from new entrants.

BANCOMAT, which has ATMs across Italy and manages payments under the PagoBANCOMAT and BANCOMAT Pay brands, handles more than 2.5 billion payment and withdrawal transactions a year worth about 210 billion euros ($213 billion) in total.

Credit Suisse analysts estimated in a recent report that BANCOMAT’s 34 million cards account for more than 40 percent of the domestic card market.

In a separate statement on Tuesday, BANCOMAT said it had launched a mobile payment service with China’s HUAWEI on cards issued by Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo.

Intesa is one of the leading shareholders in BANCOMAT, which is owned by a total of 115 Italian banks.

Italian banks were also the owners of payments company ICBPI, which they sold to private equity funds Advent International, Bain Capital and Clessidra in 2015 ahead of a 2019 stock market listing that lay the foundation for what is now Italian payments champion Nexi.

Following the pandemic-driven digital acceleration, PwC forecasts that global cashless payment volumes will grow by more than 80 percent from 2020 levels to almost 1.9 trillion transaction by 2025.