Mastercard → Nets account-to-account business

Mastercard's largest acquisition: €2.85bn for the Nordic processor's account-to-account clearing, instant-payment and e-billing businesses, cleared by the European Commission only after Mastercard agreed to license the technology to a competitor.

Mastercard's largest acquisition, buying clearing, instant payments and e-billing assets for €2.85bn after European Commission remedies.

Value

$3.2B

Announced

August 2019

Completed

March 2021

Sector

Payments

Deal type

asset purchase

Acquirer

Mastercard (United States)

Target

Nets account-to-account business (Denmark)

Why it mattered

Card networks earn on cards; instant payments between bank accounts do not need them. Rather than wait for the alternative to grow, Mastercard bought the company that ran it in the Nordics — the Danish and Norwegian clearing systems, the instant-payment infrastructure several central banks had contracted Nets to build, and the e-invoicing platform. It was the clearest statement by either network that the future of payments would be multi-rail, and that the network wanted to own the rails it did not invent.

The European Commission's concern was the market for account-to-account infrastructure sold to central banks and clearing houses, in which Nets and Mastercard's own Vocalink — bought in 2016 for the UK's Faster Payments technology — were two of very few suppliers. Mastercard's remedy, a licence of the Nets technology to a rival for an extended period, is the reason the deal took 18 months to close.

What it left behind

Mastercard as an infrastructure vendor to central banks as well as a card network, with the Nets assets alongside Vocalink under one unit; and a precedent for competition authorities treating payment infrastructure as a market of its own, which shaped the reviews of every rail-related deal that followed, including the blocking of Visa–Plaid in the US the next year.