You could call it a “mariage de raison” – Montreal-based Top 100 Solution Provider Acceo Solutions Inc. has acquired Laval-based payment solutions company Perceptech Inc.
While financial details around the acquisition were not disclosed, Acceo President and CEO Gilles Létourneau gave some hints in a phone interview. “It’s many millions of dollars, but less than 10,” he says. It was also a cash deal.
Acceo will use the Perceptech team to expand its own payment solutions expertise centre, which it describes as one of the largest in North America with more than 100,000 points of service. Perceptech will give Acceo the capability to pre-authorize bank transfers and debit payment solutions. That will complement the firm’s current capabilities to handle credit transactions, says Létourneau.
“It’s part of our strategy to help our customer to have the ability to do payments directly from their payment system to the cloud, without printing cheques,” he says. “We will link the solution with our applications.”
That will broaden the scope of Acceo’s Web-based payment gateway it offers. It’s one step closer to Acceo’s goal of providing “inter-company system-to-system payments,” the firm says.
Acceo says it has about 100 payment experts based in Montreal and Toronto to service its clients, which include merchants; issuers, acquirers, and processors; and software solutions integrators. It offers products and services that include point of sales systems, compliance services, transaction processors, and fraud prevention. It also sells software such as Avantage SMB, an accounting suite that simplifies complicated operations for the general ledger. Now that accounting software will also allow firms to send and receive direct payments without having to use cheques.
Perceptech may be known by consumers for its Tax-O-Matic services that help home owners pay municipal taxes. It also offers Rent-O-Matic and Condo-Matic software products to automate rent collection or maintenance fee collection for property managers.
This isn’t the first acquisition Acceo has made in the payments space. It announced the purchase of the majority of the assets of OGC Information Systems Inc., which makes business management software for retailers. In January 2012, under its old name of GFI Solutions, Acceo purchased Toronto-based payment solutions firm Tender Retail Inc.
“Payments is a good place to be,” Létourneau says. “This solution will be good for us to extend our own applications into the Internet.”
Acceo, a firm that rakes in more than $100 million in revenues and employs about 1,000 people after 25 years of business, isn’t disclosing the financial terms of the deal. Perceptech founded in 1990 as a software design firm specializing in telephone-based bank transfers.
Acceo plans to keep Perceptech’s 20-plus employees on board for their payments processing expertise, Létourneau says.
