CleverCards, a leading global payments platform, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the business of ExpendiaSmart® including the related Italian Licensed Electronic Money Institution, subject to regulatory approval.
ExpendiaSmart® is a provider of spend management solutions, enabling large businesses and enterprises to manage expenses using its spend management software and smart corporate cards. 
“Sharing our obsessive focus on customer and user needs, the ExpendiaSmart® team have built a solid business by earning the trust of large enterprise customers across many industries. The CleverCards platform will empower ExpendiaSmart® customers to accelerate their digital transformation. With CleverCards, Businesses, Governments and Public sector organisations simply send a digital prepaid Mastercard to an email address or mobile phone number by SMS or WhatsApp, enabling anyone, anywhere, anytime, to be paid instantly. This makes it possible for recipients to spend online, or use their mobile in-store contactlessly using Google Pay, Samsung Pay or Apple Pay immediately. I am excited to welcome the outstanding ExpendiaSmart® team” said Kealan Lennon, CleverCards Founder & CEO.
Acquisitions are a core driver of CleverCards’ strategy and vision to become the ubiquitous global payments platform. Europe represents a fragmented market in Spend Management Solutions and Smart Corporate Cards, and consolidation represents a great opportunity for a buy and build strategy which CleverCards believes will enhance solutions for its customers. Subject to regulatory approval, the addition of the Licensed Electronic Money Institution to the CleverCards group will boost its speed and agility in serving these markets and customers across Europe.
Since launching its payments platform in 2019, the fast-growing Fintech has grown dramatically, working with over 5,000 large and enterprise businesses. In February this year, Mastercard and CleverCards signed a strategic partnership to expand the usage of digital cards across Europe, a FinTech partnership that provides unprecedented, unique access to Mastercard business development teams in key markets and to key commercial clients. 
 

CAPITAL RAISE
Separately, CleverCards also revealed it is closing out on a capital raise of €10m in the next four weeks, with investors in the current round including former PayPal executive Gareth Lambe, now head of Facebook Ireland and a board member of WhatsApp/Facebook payments, financial services entrepreneur Dónal Daly (who sold Avoca Capital to KKR) and a number of successful entrepreneurs like Pat Gunne (CEO of Green Reit Plc sold for €1.35bn), Smurfit family and a number of other notable private family offices.
The demand for smarter, more intuitive Spend Management and Smart Corporate Cards solutions has really piqued institutional and private equity investor interest alike. There are eye watering capital raises in the payments space. In the last month alone, we’ve witnessed some of fintech’s biggest capital raises specifically in the payment category; Pleo in Europe announced a $100 million fund raise; Brex in the US completed a $425 million investment round; and let’s not of course forget the $600 million raised by Stripe in March this year.
Within the European Spend Management category, there are some players focused on the SMB segment like Soldo, Spendesk and Pleo who following €10m Series A rounds, completed private equity rounds of between €45m and €65m just twelve to eighteen months later, at valuations understood to be in the €250m-€350m range.
The B2B Fintech market, however, remains highly fragmented and CleverCards is planning to consolidate it through an aggressive buy and build acquisition strategy. Today announcing the acquisition of ExpendiaSmart and with a number of further acquisitions in the pipeline, the company said it will start planning for a raise expected to be in the region of €50m ($60m) over the next 12 months.
Through targeted acquisitions and accelerated growth with the support of the Mastercard, CleverCards is well positioned to become the market leader, focused on the large company / enterprise segment of the Spend Management category, accelerating its mission to enable anyone, anywhere, anytime, to be paid instantly and realising its vision of becoming the ubiquitous global payments platform.