SIA acquires Unicredit’s emoney processing activities for Italy, Germany and Austria

Unicredit Business Integrated Solutions (UBIS), a company in the Unicredit Group, and SIA signed an agreement for the sale to the latter – for the sum of €500 million – of the processing activities of around 13.5 million payment cards and the management of 206,000 POS terminals and 12,000 ATMs in Italy, Germany and Austria. Since last year, SIA has been operating on the Romanian market and is looking for new opportunities of investments.

UBIS also signed with SIA a ten-year outsourcing contract for the supply of processing services for transactions made using debit, credit and prepaid cards, and for the management of POS and ATM terminals.

For SIA this acquisition represents the continuation along the path of growth: thanks to this operation, revenues increase by over 20% (2015 pro-forma figures).

“This acquisition allows SIA to strengthen further its competitive positioning at domestic and international level, especially in Germany and Austria – two of the main target markets in the 2016-2018 Business Plan – to increase the volumes of the payments managed on our technology platforms and thus achieve greater economies of scale” – commented Massimo Arrighetti, CEO of SIA.

Thanks to this agreement, in the e-money sector, SIA’s pro-forma 2015 figures indicate an increase in card payment transactions from around 4 billion to over 5 billion.

SIA is European leader in the design, creation and management of technology infrastructures and services for Financial Institutions, Central Banks, Corporates and Public Administration bodies, in the areas of cards, e-payments, network services and capital markets.

SIA Group provides its services in over 40 countries, and also operates through its subsidiaries in Hungary and South Africa. The company has offices in Milan, Brussels and Utrecht. In 2015, SIA managed 9.9 billion clearing transactions, 3.3 billion card transactions, 2.8 billion payments, 41.7 billion financial transactions and carried 358 terabytes of data on the network.

The Group is made up of seven companies: the parent SIA, the Italian companies Emmecom (innovative network applications for banks and businesses), Pi4Pay (advanced collection and payment services), TSP (front-end services for companies and P.A.), and Ubiq (innovative technology solutions for marketing), Perago in South Africa and SIA Central Europe in Hungary.

www.sia.eu