By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 26th, 2024
Under the leadership of CEO Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan has acquired over five startups. The company’s current acquisition decision stems from a trial it ran with Renovite last fall.
JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE: JPM) has announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire a payment startup called Renovite Technologies Inc to better compete with the likes of Stripe, Block, and other fintech firms.
“We are excited to acquire Renovite and accelerate our roadmap for helping our clients stay at the cutting-edge of payments innovation. This acquisition will help us achieve our goal to develop the next-generation payments processing platform globally,” announced Max Neukirchen, Global Head of Payments & Commerce Solutions, JPMorgan.
JPMorgan has sought to improve on its payment modernization strategy and also create its next-generation merchant acquiring platform. For this reason, the acquisition is said to be a strategic one to execute its vision.
Based on transaction volume, JPMorgan is the world’s biggest provider of merchant services. However, the surging e-commerce sales and the proliferation of new payment methods have given an edge to some fintech firms. JPMorgan’s merchant acquiring revenue was said to have slowed down last year regardless of processing over $9 trillion daily across several businesses. According to global payments chief Takis Georgakopoulos, its services offered were much fewer than some notable fintech companies.
Under the leadership of CEO Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan has acquired over five startups. Its current acquisition decision stems from a trial it ran with Renovite last fall. Mike Blandina, the bank’s global head of payments technology discloses that Renovite’s product especially the “cloud-based switch that routes payments to various providers” was found impressive, hence the decision to take over the startup. The switch platform could allow JPMorgan to add new payment options without going through any complex coding.
“Our clients value choice; they want to offer many different payment methods to their clients, whether it’s Visa, Mastercard, but also Buy-now, pay-later, etc. The ability to turn on these very country-specific payment methods also helps us in our geographic expansion, because we don’t need to spend a lot of time building out local payment methods,” said Max Neukirchen, the firm’s global head of payments & commerce solutions.
Neukirchen further mentioned that JPMorgan desires to draft 125 engineers of the firm residing in India and the UK into the team to assist in its product roadmap.
Jamie Demon has always maintained that the fintech industry poses a great threat to traditional banks with the rising competition in the area of payments.