The pipeline for mergers and acquisitions in the fintech sector is likely to intensify next year as the Latin American financial industry shows clear signs of consolidation, industry experts said in a Dec. 7 panel at the LendIt Fintech LatAm conference.
Growing financial technology companies in the region have resorted to acquisitions to achieve regional expansion and grow lending capabilities. Ualá's recent purchase of ABC Capital SA Institución de Banca Múltiple in Mexico, as well as APJUSTO SAPI de CV's acquisition of Banco Finterra SA Institución de Banca Múltiple are the latest examples in what experts believe will be a growing trend.
"We are seeing lots of acquisition and consolidation of financial services in Latin America," Leila Search, a Latin America lead investor with the International Finance Corp., said at a panel on fintech M&A at the event hosted in Miami. Banks, she said, will "eventually become targets" of fintech companies.
Industry executives at the panel argued that there is a closer tie between banks and fintech firms, with recurring partnerships between both kinds of players.
Several fintech players are looking to expand into banking products, but obtaining regulatory licenses is not an easy task for fintechs. For that reason, M&A is looking increasingly attractive to startups with significant size and capital.
"We are going after licensed institutions as part of our M&A strategy," Wagner Ruiz, a co-founder at Brazilian fintech firm Ebanx SA, said.
Ebanx, a cross-border payments Brazilian unicorn, has bought five companies so far, including the latest announcement in November to buy B2B payment fintech Juno. Earlier, the company had acquired both SME-software-oriented JoyPay and Brazilian lender Banco Topázio SA.
"The relationship between banks and fintech is much better now," he said. "Everybody is regulated. Lending, payments, credit. ... This is putting us closer to financial institutions."
Banks in Latin America have long called for a level playing field when it comes to regulation, arguing that rising players from the tech industry profited from not being held accountable to banking regulation.
Over the past years, several central banks and financial supervisors in Latin America have issued different frameworks to regulate the fintech industry.
Plenty of (pricey) opportunities
According to Ruiz, Ebanx has some 300 potential M&A targets on their radar. "We are still learning how to move forward with M&A. There are so many opportunities."
However, the executive argued that many firms are looking overpriced at the moment and that it was difficult to find the right deal at the right price. "Everybody is a little bit expensive right now," he said.
In any case, experts said that conversations on potential mergers and acquisitions between banks and fintechs were ongoing.
For Alejandro Perez, a managing director with Monocular investment banking firm, banks and fintechs are becoming "increasingly comfortable" with each other in discussing valuations. Different approaches when it comes to assessing the intrinsic value of an asset has been a frequent cause of M&A deals being put on ice, he added.
"People are now coming to terms at least in the methodology to value a potential transaction," he said.
For Russell Weiss, head of decision science with Banco BS2 SA, more M&A deals between banks and fintechs should be expected as rising financial technology companies "will eventually cross paths with a bigger player."
For him, that will increasingly narrow the frontier between both industries, with differences between them likely to fade.
"People that have been in tech for a while can get used to the idea that [they are] battling banks and that they are rebels inventing new stuff," he said. "That is a great attitude, but once the company is in growth mode, it begins to look like a bank anyway."
The big picture on M&A
The market for broad M&A activity in the Latin American financial sector has remained busy up to the third quarter, with purchases by traditional banks also contributing to a steady pipeline of deals.
Not only are fintech companies buying banks, but financial institutions are also acquiring technology companies in order to compete with digital newcomers.
The number of deals in the first nine months of 2021 came to 79, S&P Global Market Intelligence data shows, equal to the same period in 2020. The pace of deal-making in the financial sector picked up steam around a year ago, as economies gradually reopened from COVID-19 lockdowns and cash-plenty lenders took advantage of opportunities in the space.
M&A deals in the insurance sector led the way during the third quarter as financial reinsurers and brokers accelerated the pace of consolidation in Latin America's financial sector.