Worldline to buy merchant-acquiring activities of Italy's Banco Desio

PARIS (Reuters) -French payment services company Worldline announced on Monday a deal to buy the merchant-acquiring activities of Italy's Banco Desio, which delivers payment solutions for various businesses, for about 100 million euros ($99.4 million).

The payments sector has seen several big takeover deals in recent years as the growing use of e-commerce platforms and smartphones sparked competition to develop new systems.

In 2020, Worldline bought French rival Ingenico for around 7.8 billion euros, and the company said earlier this year that it planned more takeover deals.

"This operation is fully in line with our strategy to further expand our merchant services activities towards the south of Europe and in particular in Italy, a highly attractive and strategic market for Worldline where we intend to continue leveraging our footprint built last year through the acquisition of Axepta Italy early 2022 and the set-up of the Worldline MS Italy joint venture," said Worldline CEO Gilles Grapinet.

Worldline said the Banco Desio deal was expected to close in the first quarter of 2023 and would bring in extra revenue of around 15 million euros within the first year.

($1 = 1.0058 euros)

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Sherry Jacob-Phillips)