News

Euronet acquires international currency exchange specialist XE

XE will contribute digital expertise to the Euronet money transfer segment and provide a substantial online presence for the company, an announcement says.

July 13, 2015

Euronet Worldwide Inc., an electronic payments provider, has announced its acquisition of XE, a provider of digital foreign exchange information on the Internet. Ontario, Canada-based XE will be consolidated into Euronet's money transfer segment, which also includes Ria and HiFX.

According to a press release from Euronet, XE earns revenue from two services tied to currency exchange rates:

• subscription-based fees for delivering global currency exchange rate data through its proprietary currency data API; and
• transaction-based revenue from XE Trade money transfers, an online international payments service made available to businesses and consumers through an outsourced service contract.

Additionally, XE attracts advertisers who place ads on the site, the release said. The company's websites draw more than 1.6 billion total page views from more than 200 million unique visitors per year, and  fulfills more than 2.9 billion annual requests.

The acquisition of XE gives Euronet an extremely large Internet presence and a user base attuned to foreign currency. In exchange, Euronet offers XE breadth and depth in foreign currency products, a strong balance sheet and geographic expansion opportunities.

Euronet released a statement about the acquisition from chairman and CEO Michael J. Brown:

Euronet's vision is to become the global leader in digital money transfer, and XE is one more milestone towards that goal. Building a brand and generating high quality traffic to your digital properties require some of the heaviest investment when constructing a digital business. XE has made that investment and in doing so, has become a top 500 global website and the world's top currency site. ...

Ria and HiFX bring XE many of the products and capabilities that the XE team and their customers need, while XE brings Euronet the exposure and high quality traffic that would have taken us a decade to build. With almost half of XE's visitors needing to make an international payment, you can really see why we are so excited about the combined opportunity."

Euronet will use approximately $60 million from its revolving credit agreement together with approximately 640,000 Euronet shares and an undisclosed amount of cash to complete the acquisition, the release said.

XE's foreign currency payments are currently processed through a vendor, and Euronet expects XE's annual revenue of approximately $10 million to improve to approximately $22 million once the payments processing is converted to Euronet's platform at HiFX.