Looking to Sharpen Its Edge in Merchant Services, NMI Acquires Agreement Express’s Payments Assets

Payment platform provider NMI has acquired Agreement Express Inc.’s merchant onboarding, underwriting, and monitoring technologies. The acquisition, which is for the payments portion of Agreement Express’s total business, is aimed at allowing NMI to provide integrated software vendors, independent sales organizations, and fintechs with tools that can speed up merchant onboarding.

The acquisition price was not disclosed. Frontier Growth, a private-equity firm, will own the wealth-management arm of Agreement Express’s business.

NMI’s acquisition adds to its platform customizable risk scoring, automated data collection, compliance monitoring, know-your-customer and anti-money laundering technology, and fraud screenings. ISVs, ISOs, and fintechs can leverage these tools to streamline merchant onboarding and grow their merchant portfolios faster, Schaumburg, Ill.-based NMI says.

A major impetus for the acquisition is that it addresses market demand for simplifying merchant underwriting and will allow NMI to deliver more value per merchant to its partners, according to NMI.

The rationale also includes a need to keep up with developments in the merchant-underwriting and -onboarding processes. “With the market demanding innovation in underwriting and a Stripe-like experience, this acquisition enables NMI to evolve the manual processes into tech-led solutions,” Kate Hampton, senior vice president of corporate development for NMI, says by email. “This results in payment firms experiencing a streamlined, speedy process for new merchant accounts.” Stripe Inc. is a fintech known for innovative technology aimed at easing merchant onboarding and processing.

For Vancouver-based Agreement Express, the deal could create added value through a new distribution channel, not only to both company’s joint partners, but the broader payments market, the company says.

“As the payments landscape continues to evolve, companies are looking for new ways to scale with modular solutions and bringing together our solutions provides even more freedom of choice,” Agreement Express chief executive Dave O’Brien says in a prepared statement.

Its latest acquisition builds on NMI’s deal in January to acquire IRIS CRM, a platform that provides payments-related merchant-management services. That deal handed NMI a payments-centric customer-relationship management (CRM) application that integrates with its payment-gateway services, enabling NMI to engage in merchant prospecting and management and enable faster merchant onboarding.

“[The Agreement Express] acquisition, coupled with our other recent merger and acquisition activity, including IRIS CRM, continues to expand our solutions beyond traditional gateway and into commerce enablement,” Hampton says.