Card Notes
ACQUIRING
euroConex rebrands
After its acquisitions and change of control over the past two years, US Bank’s merchant acquiring processor euroConex has rebranded itself as Elavon and has emerged as the fourth biggest card processor in Europe, after Streamline, Barclays and Crédit Agricole. CEO Roger Alexander says payments processed are expected to reach 620 million and turnover of €44 billion in 2007.
“Our perception is that we’re the biggest in terms of cross-border acquiring,” Alexander adds: “That’s fuelled by the international card schemes, who see competitor activity more clearly than we do.”
The company doubled its size in November 2005 with the purchase of Citibank Card Acceptance, the European merchant acquiring subsidiary of Citigroup (ECR, Jan/Feb 2006, p6). This deal, added to the purchases in 2004 of Alliance & Leicester’s UK acquiring business, CardPoint in Poland and Euroline Norge, provided a platform which has led, Alexander says, to continuing double-digit growth.
The M&A activity also required four companies, on top of the Bank of Ireland acquiring business which was injected into euroConex on its formation in 2002, to be welded together. “We didn’t have an identity, so we needed to create one,” Alexander says: “We’ve changed the historical structures into a single entity.”
The customer base has a focus on acceptance from petrol, travel, airline and hotel companies, but also includes general retailers, particularly in Poland and the UK. Elavon is currently evaluating about 10 RFPs for pan-European acquiring, mainly in T&E and general retailing.
Hand-in-hand with the rebranding element of creating a single
company has gone development of a new processing platform. “As
we acquired the other companies, we acquired four different platforms,” says
Alexander: “So we built a fifth, which looks very much like
the Irish one, and we’ve begun to convert the Citi business
to this platform – we’re expecting to see huge gains
in economies of scale, efficiencies and customer service capability.” 
