Visa announced an agreement to acquire CardinalCommerce, a specialist in e-commerce payment authentication. The acquisition is meant to help Visa’s clients and merchant partners accelerate digital commerce. Visa already provides Cardinal’s services to merchants and acquirers through its CyberSource merchant and acquirer enablement platform. Additionally, Visa will draw upon its global relationships and presence to drive international expansion of Cardinal’s products and services. As Visa plans to integrate tokenisation into Visa Checkout over the next 18 months, the addition of Cardinal will allow more integration of 3-D Secure and delivery of these new fraud mitigation capabilities to merchants.
Cardinal will continue to operate and serve all of its clients as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Visa, and its authentication platform will continue to support a broad range of payment brands and partners across the industry. Co-founders Tim Sherwin and Chandra Balasubramanian will remain as leaders of the Cardinal team, based in Mentor, Ohio. Financial terms of the transaction are not disclosed. The transaction, which is subject to the customary closing conditions, is expected to close in Visa’s second fiscal quarter 2017.