FXPress Payment Services Limited (FXPress), the fintech payment services company, is pleased to announce that it has entered an agreement to acquire Avila House Limited (“Avila House”), a licensed Small Electronic Money Institution (“small EMI”), subject to receiving appropriate regulatory approvals. The deal gives FXPress customers licensed access to receive and hold client funds in multi-currency accounts, allowing the company to further expand its offering with new products and services.

FXPress is a foreign exchange specialist that removes the complexity of international payments so that businesses can focus on delivering a great experience for customers. It has developed a proprietary cloud-based payment services platform that will enable seamless integration into corporate accounting systems and bank accounts to optimise transactions. This allows it toprovide foreign exchange services to SME clients at prices significantly below that of the mainstream banks.

The acquisition of Avila Houseallows FXPress to expand its product and service offering to provide access to accounts where clients can deposit and retain funds for future use.FXPress currently processes £600 million worth of foreign exchange transactions per year, the majority of these are specific payments. By integrating Avila House’s payment services, FXPress will be able to allow customers access to multi-currency accounts with individual IBAN numbers to manage cash and further optimise foreign exchange payments.

The payments processing market is rapidly evolving as a result of European regulatory changes arising from the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD 2). These changes, which are taking place in the UK under the banner of the Open Banking Initiative (OBI), are set to open up the market and increase competition in payment services. FXPress's proprietary fintech platform has been designed to take advantage of the OBI by accessing payment account data to streamline foreign currency transactions.

The acquisition of Avila House is to be settled in part cash and part shares.Completion of the purchase is subject to approval by the Financial Conduct Authority, which is expected in the coming weeks.

Jason Conibear, CEO of FXPress, said: "The acquisition of Avila House expands our product and service offering to provide simple, easy to access, efficient and integrated payment services to our SME clients. Now, our clients can have the account their business needs, in the currency they want. This is an exciting step as we build out our modular, highly scalable platform to achieve our goal of making international finance simpler, cheaper and easier to access for all businesses.”