Britain’s ‘Competition Watchdog’ is Examining Visa’s Recent Acquisition of Earthport Plc.

As per an all-new report released by Reuters a couple of days back, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has released a statement saying that it will be “looking closely” at Visa Inc’s latest acquisition plans associated with payments provider ‘Earthport Plc’. The entire exercise is being carried out by the government body so as to gauge if the deal will possibly reduce the “level of healthy competition within this market sector”.

For those of our readers who might not be aware, Visa recently agreed to purchase Earthport for a price of around 247 million pounds (approx. USD $321.45 million). By doing so, the global powerhouse was able to edge out its closest rival Mastercard Inc (by means of a bidding war.)

Other Key Details Worth Noting

• Through the completion of this deal, Visa’s executive brass believes that the firm will be able to expand its cross-border network service in a big way.
• As mentioned earlier, Earthport is a payments provider that offers customers with a “low-cost option for traditional financial systems”. It does so by allowing banks and money transfer firms to make use of a single monetary avenue as opposed to using multiple channels that are linked to a number of different payment providers across the globe.

Final Take

Over the course of the past couple of years, the payments market has become one of the most lucrative industries in the world. This is because this niche domain is driven by technological innovations as well as certain other digital factors. It now remains to be seen what the outcome of this entire investigation turns out to be like.