Concardis has increased its stake in Cardtech Card & POS Service GmbH to 100 percent of the shares. In 2015, the Eschborn full-service payment provider acquired some 70 percent and thus a majority of the shares in the Cologne-based payments company, and now Cardtech will be fully integrated into the Concardis Group. It will continue to exist as an independent limited liability company under German law and Dr. Dietrich Gottwald and Christof Kohns will continue to be the firm’s managing directors.

“By taking over Cardtech we are strengthening our position in technical network operations and bringing crucial IT expertise on board. In this way, we will be able to expand the Cologne site into a central technical hub and press ahead more efficiently there with developing innovative solutions for stationary and virtual Points of Sale,” comments Marcus W. Mosen, CEO of Concardis. “By bundling expertise under a single roof we will be able to work together more closely within the group and thus develop new production solutions for our clients even faster.”

To date, Cardtech has primarily been specialized in POS network operations and payment settlements. To do full justice to the role of an omnichannel payment provider, in the course of the last two years a payment service provider platform for e-payments was set up with Concardis.

“As part of the Concardis Group we will be able to develop our company into a leading technical network operator and IT competence center. At the same time, we will play a decisive part in establishing an internationally active German payment champion, which is the expressed goal of Concardis GmbH. We are very happy to be joining up with our colleagues in Eschborn to realize this vision,” says Dr. Dietrich Gottwald, Cardtech Managing Director. 

The complete buy-out of Cardtech was facilitated by Advent International and Bain Capital Private Equity, the new partners in Concardis GmbH. The consortium acquired Concardis at the beginning of 2017 and announced that by making stronger investments in infrastructure and innovation they wished to accelerate the payment service provider’s growth. They laid the first foundations for this buy-and-build strategy in April of this year when they acquired the purchase-on-account specialist Ratepay, where the plan is likewise to integrate it into the Concardis Group as an independent company.