BMO and RBC are selling off Moneris, one of Canada’s largest payment processors, to US-based private equity firm Francisco Partners.
The news: The two Canadian banks announced an agreement to sell their co-owned operation for $2 billion CAD on Monday evening. As part of the deal, BMO and RBC will each receive 50 percent of the sale’s proceeds and exclusively refer their customers to Moneris going forward.
The transaction is expected to close in early 2027, subject to closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Once closed, Moneris will join the numerous payment processing companies in Francisco Partners’ portfolio, including Hypercom, Paymetric, PayLease, NMI, and Verifone. Under Francisco Partners’ leadership, Jeff Sloan, the former president and CEO of Global Payments, will become the chairman of Moneris.
From the source: “Moneris is one of the strongest payments solution providers in North America, with a trusted brand, leading technology, and a proven team that has helped shape the way Canadian businesses operate,” Francisco Partners’ Peter Christodoulo said in a statement. He added that there’s a “significant opportunity to build on that foundation” through investment in innovation, platform expansion and long-term growth, while preserving Moneris’s “deeply Canadian identity.”
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The context: Founded in 2000 and based in Toronto, Moneris provides online and in-person payment systems for Canadian merchants. The firm has nearly 2,000 employees and supports more than five billion transactions per year. Moneris claims it powers one in three transactions in Canada. The Francisco Partners deal comes almost exactly one year after Reuters reported that BMO and RBC were planning to put Moneris up for sale.
Final thought: Moneris is being sold off just over a year after TD inked a deal to offload 3,400 contracts from its wholly-owned payment processing business to US-based FinTech giant Fiserv. Meanwhile, Scotiabank and CIBC are both partnered with US-based firms, Chase Payment Solutions and Global Payments, for their payment processing offering. As Helcim founder and CEO Nic Beique has pointed out, Canada’s “Big Five” banks have now almost completely withdrawn from independent payments processing, ceding their services to US-based providers. These changes come as Canada prepares to modernize its national payment rails through the introduction of a Real-Time Rails payments system, which is set to launch later this year.
Feature image courtesy Moneris.