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Fleet-fueling and corporate-payments provider WEX Inc. reported this week that it has a deal to acquire Noventis Inc., a bill-payment network and virtual card specialist.
South Portland, Maine-based WEX said in a news release that it already has a “longstanding relationship” with Noventis as a supplier of virtual cards for WEX’s customers.
In an emailed statement to Digital Transactions News, WEX president of corporate payments Jay Dearborn said “this acquisition will expand WEX’s reach as a corporate-payments supplier and provide enhanced commercial channels to bill aggregators and financial institutions.”
Houston-based Noventis delivers expedited bill payments to 100,000 consumer-to-business and business-to-business billers, including utilities, cable and satellite providers, telephone and Internet companies, and insurance and health-care providers.
The Noventis deal, terms of which were not disclosed, marks yet another step by WEX to develop virtual cards’ potential. A year ago, WEX bought AOC Solutions, a longstanding technology provider for its virtual card product, in a $129.8 million deal that also included an AOC affiliate, the e-commerce and corporate-payment processor 3Delta Systems.
Virtual cards, which employ one-time-use card numbers, can a headache for suppliers receiving such payments if they don’t have the systems in place to handle them. To help ease the pain, Noventis in May teamed with HighRadius Corp., a cloud-based accounts-receivable software company, to reduce the manual processing and reconciliation work that often accompanies receipt of virtual cards.
Two months earlier, Noventis said it and B2B payments company Comdata, a unit of Fleetcor Technologies Inc., signed a multiyear agreement that gives Comdata a new distribution channel for its virtual credit card platform. Under the agreement, Noventis will be able to deliver payments via virtual credit cards issued by Comdata.
