Australian financial payments company EML Payments has acquired Sentenial and its its open banking brand Nuapay for a consideration of up to €110m.

Sentenial and Nuapay operate in the European open banking sector and and will now provide EML with the capabilities to manage payments.

EML said it will expand Sentenial's platform and products into the North American and Australian markets, as well as Europe. The combined group is expected to become one of the largest fintech enablers in the open banking and prepaid sector globally.

At present EML says it processes more than $18 billion in payments each year. Sentenial handles more than €45 billion and the partners say that the combined group will handle more than A$90 billion in Gross Debit Volume.

EML group chief executive Tom Cregan said: “The acquisition of Sentenial will be the next evolution for EML, as we transition into a broader payments business by adding instant account-to-account payments into our suite of solutions for customers.

In Association with

“EML supports thousands of prepaid programmes globally, and our platform is how our customers interact with us. Sentenial operates an enterprise-grade payments platform processing more than €45 billion per annum, and is, therefore, a similar business to EML but servicing a different customer set with different payment types. 

“The net result of bringing the companies together allows EML to increase our market by expanding our product suite.”

Sentenial founder and chief executive Sean Fitzgerald (pictured above) added: “Nuapay’s mission is to be the best way to pay and get paid. We are proud to have developed a market-leading account-to-account and Open Banking payments platform over nearly two decades in business. 

“The revolution in payments caused by Open Banking and real-time payments is rapidly building momentum globally, and we are hugely excited by this opportunity to move to a global scale as part of EML. From the moment EML approached us, we’ve been impressed by their vision, ambition and growing ecosystem.’'

Sixty Sentenial staff, spread across offices in Maynooth, London, Paris, Brussels and Krakow, will continue with EML.

EML is paying €40m cash on completion and issuing the vendors with EML shares valued at c.€31m. The deal calls for further earnout payment of up to  €40m, payable in cash or shares at EML's discretion in 2024.