What happened: Norwegian Visma has announced the acquisition of Belgian invoicing and tax solution Accountable (Visma). Visma was incorporated in 1996 in Oslo following the merger of Multisoft, SpecTec, and Dovre Information Systems. Today, the company is majority-owned by private equity companies and is well-known for acquiring and growing business software for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as freelancers. Accountable is a service for freelancers to write invoices and, even more importantly, manage their taxes. I have covered Accountable very recently after their launch of Accountable banking.
My comment: If you live in Europe, chances are that Visma has acquired a software company in your country, such as Yuki (Netherlands), inFakt (Poland), Buchhaltungsbutler (Germany), Mobilexpense (Belgium), ProSaldo.net (Austria), Bluegarden (Denmark), Holded (Spain), and many more. They are also looking for more (Visma website). Most of these companies offer accounting, payroll, invoicing, or HR software solutions, and they tend to keep their brand, often accompanied by a small “by Visma” addition. Embedded Finance is relevant to almost all of Visma’s companies. Although few of them currently offer financial services, the two most recent acquisitions, Accountable and Mobilexpense, had already provided banking products before their acquisition. Besides these two companies, I found only eAccounting from the Netherlands as another Visma company offering a banking product (although I haven’t checked all of Visma’s companies, to be fair). That being said, I would be stunned if building and launching financial products were not one of the big topics for many of Visma’s companies.
