Canada

BMO and RBC are selling off Moneris, one of Canada’s largest payment processors, to US-based private equity firm Francisco Partners.

The context: Founded in 2000 and based in Toronto, Moneris provides online and in-person payment systems for Canadian merchants. The firm has nearly 2,000 employees and supports more than five billion transactions per year. Moneris claims it powers one in three transactions in Canada. The Francisco Partners deal comes almost exactly one year after Reuters reported that BMO and RBC were planning to put Moneris up for sale.

Final thought: Moneris is being sold off just over a year after TD inked a deal to offload 3,400 contracts from its wholly-owned payment processing business to US-based FinTech giant Fiserv. Meanwhile, Scotiabank and CIBC are both partnered with US-based firms, Chase Payment Solutions and Global Payments, for their payment processing offering. As Helcim founder and CEO Nic Beique has pointed out, Canada’s “Big Five” banks have now almost completely withdrawn from independent payments processing, ceding their services to US-based providers. These changes come as Canada prepares to modernize its national payment rails through the introduction of a Real-Time Rails payments system, which is set to launch later this year.