Distra Acquisition by ACI Worldwide

GrowthPoint Technology Partners, LLC acted as the financial advisor to Distra in their sale to ACI Worldwide, a leading international provider of payment systems. The USD $48.75 million cash transaction closed September 13, 2012.

Financial institutions around the world need reliable systems that can authorize and route financial transactions. The Distra Universal Payments Platform delivers a fault-tolerant, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based payments platform that helps to significantly reduce the risk and cost of payments transformation without compromising security, performance, scalability and reliability.

In contrast with traditional end-of-day consolidation practices, the Distra switch can support high volumes of real-time transaction settlements. According to John Cromwell, Managing Director at GrowthPoint, “Distra’s UPP is a critical component in delivering highly scalable and reliable next generation payment solutions that enable financial institutions to bridge the gap between legacy payments architectures and new payment systems that encompass mobile, web based, social and other emerging payment protocols.”

The integration of ACI and Distra technologies will enable financial institutions, processors and retailers to enhance the flexibility and performance of their existing payments infrastructure to address market needs, such as mobile, social channels and payment services hubs. In addition, this acquisition will enable ACI’s payments products to integrate more tightly with customers’ enterprise architectures, reducing their total cost of ownership.

“ACI has been working toward a goal of building the broadest, most integrated solutions to serve the payments industry, which we call ACI’s Agile Payments Solution strategy,” said Tony Scotto, executive vice president, Global Development, ACI Worldwide. “A critical element of achieving this vision is an enterprise payments services bus that can support the integration of multiple payment applications in a highly scalable and reliable manner. The Universal Payments Platform will help accelerate ACI’s ability to achieve enterprise payments.”

Mike Shepherd, Managing Director at GrowthPoint commented that “Distra’s core value proposition is around the real time transaction processing technology that takes advantage of modern Java technology. The architecture is fault tolerant and the transaction records are flexible enough to accommodate not only the different types of payment transaction records, but also all the additional detailed marketing information associated with those transactions. This extra data is very useful to the customers and merchants and provides increased ability to perform big data and other marketing analyses to improve customer and merchant relationships. It was extremely valuable that Distra had been proven in production in the U.K Bank Automated Clearing System as well as large Australian Banks.”

The complete announcement by can be found at ACI Worldwide’s website

GrowthPoint provides M&A and financial advisory services to technology companies around the world.