Japan’s NEC, a multinational information technology and electronics company, has agreed to buy Switzerland based financial technology company Avaloq Group AG in a deal worth $2.0032 billion, media reports said. The deal is expected to be completed by April 2021 after regulatory approval, NEC said in a statement.
The acquisition of Avaloq will provide NEC with digital finance software and domain knowledge as it forays into the global market and strengthens its business on the digital government front.
NEC will acquire Europe’s top provider of financial asset management software from its owners and private equity firm Warburg Pincus, which holds a 45 percent stake in the company.
Avaloq reported sales of around $664 million last year and nearly 70 percent of its sales came from Europe. It provides banking software mostly to private institutions and has a customer base in 30 countries. Its clientele includes banking giants such as Deutsche Bank and HSBC.
Recently, Avaloq has been accelerating its fintech operations by collaborating with numerous fintech startups.
With regard to the deal, NEC president and chief executive Takashi Niino said in a statement, “NEC will be placing great importance on building long-term relationships with Avaloq and its customers, and aims to create new solutions that combine Avaloq’s software with NEC’s cutting-edge technologies, such as its brand of biometric authentication solutions, ‘Bio-Idiom,’ the company’s AI technology brand, ‘NEC the WISE,’ and its innovative blockchain technologies.”