The Italian bank UniCredit is reportedly considering (!) acquiring Polish banking-as-a-service provider Vodeno. The story is in its infancy, and people involved in the process mention that the deal might not go through. But it’s worth a closer look nonetheless. For many, including myself, this news came as a surprise, most importantly because of the two names the news included.
I did not consider UniCredit to be a bank that would acquire an infrastructure fintech of this size. I did learn during my research that UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel (who still looks great even when wearing a down feather vest under his suit jacket—an advantage of being Italian, I guess) is being held in high regard for his achievements at UniCredit in the past few years, but his background is ‘banking’ and not ‘technology’.
On the other hand, Vodeno employs more than 200 employees (according to LinkedIn) and has received a sizeable investment since its founding. The company is well-known for its services in the embedded finance industry; however, I have not seen any new customer launches in the past few months (in Germany, I am aware of their current customers, Metro FS and UnitPlus, as well as Vantik, before it went bankrupt). Perhaps Vodeno’s owner, private equity firm Warburg Pincus, is pushing for an exit in light of the challenging atmosphere for fintech infrastructure companies?
Personally, I believe many traditional banks (incl. UniCredit) have a big opportunity when they become an infrastructure provider for fintech companies and brands. And obviously, the technology piece is the hardest for them to build, so an acquisition seems logical. But I would assume that with an acquisition, the bank is trying to get talent and technology in-house, while the brand of the infrastructure provider (which will likely go away) and their existing customers and revenue are not that important. If we agree on this, is Vodeno then the ideal target for an acquisition? Or wouldn’t a different provider be more appealing?
I have a feeling that UniCredit started directly speaking with Vodeno and has not looked at any other provider in the market. Personally, I would have done this differently and scouted the market properly before going into deeper discussions with one provider (if anybody at UniCredit wants access to my European banking-as-a-service provider list with 34 names, let me know 😉 ).
For the reasons mentioned above, I have my doubts that this exact deal will happen, but it would be great to see more banks getting into the embedded finance space, either through acquisitions or other strategies.
