How NMI’s Deal for Sphere’s Commercial Division Will Ease New Merchant Accounts

Payments provider NMI LLC announced Thursday it has acquired the commercial division of Sphere, a cloud-based software and payments-technology company. Sphere Commercial Division primarily serves non-integrated small and mid-size businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Schaumburg, Ill.-based NMI says the acquisition will strengthen its underwriting and risk-management capabilities and allow its partners, including independent software vendors, independent sales organizations, and fintechs, to create merchant accounts within the NMI platform, while still being able to use their own merchant accounts. As a result, NMI partners will have another option to create a merchant account, the company says.

In addition, the deal will allow NMI to serve new types of customers such as payment novices that value streamlined, technology-first payments offering, Kate Hampton, chief strategy officer for NMI, says by email.

“The Sphere Commercial Division has always sold merchant accounts through a partner channel, which made this acquisition a perfect fit,” she says. “When we were looking for the ideal target for this acquisition, we were very specific about compatibility with NMI’s ethos of enablement and values of modularity, flexibility, and choice. [The acquisition] resonates with our partners and allows us to retain our core values so we can build our next-generation offerings on a solid foundation.”

NMI supports more than 3,900 independent software vendors, indepenendent sales organizations and fintechs that enable more than 280,000 merchants on the NMI platform and that generate more than $200 billion in annual payment volume.

“The addition of Sphere’s Commercial Division allows us to add yet another module to our stack of payment-enablement tools, providing our partners with the modularity and choice to better customize payment experiences for their merchants,” said NMI chief executive Vijay Sondhi, in a statement. “These added capabilities of underwriting, risk management, and merchant account creation are a game changer, not only for our partners but also for their merchants in the race to provide the most convenient, painless experience for end consumers.”

As part of the acquisition, Tom Bannon, chief operating officer and president of Sphere Commercial Division, will join NMI as senior vice president for partner monetization. “Partners today are looking to own as much of the payments ecosystem as possible, and we are adding another layer to that by combining forces with NMI,” Bannon says in a statement. “Our risk-management and underwriting capabilities fit very nicely into NMI’s vision of full commerce enablement as we give partners the choice and ownership they crave.”