---
title: "Nexi → Nets"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/nexi-buy-nets-2020"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2020"
author: "Ihor Vlasov"
reviewed: "2026-09-20"
---

# Nexi → Nets

An all-share merger at a €7.8bn enterprise value which, together with Nexi's parallel purchase of Italy's SIA, made the Italian processor the largest payments group in Europe by transaction volume.

An all-share merger at a €7.8bn enterprise value which, with the parallel SIA deal, made Nexi the largest European payments group by volume.

- **Acquirer:** Nexi (Italy)
- **Target:** Nets (Denmark)
- **Value:** $9.2B
- **Announced:** November 2020
- **Completed:** July 2021
- **Sector:** Payments
- **Deal type:** merger

## Why it mattered

European payments were consolidating a year behind the United States, and Nexi — listed in 2019 as Italy's near-monopoly processor — used its shares to buy scale across the continent in two deals announced within weeks of each other. Nets brought the Nordics, Germany, Poland and much of central Europe, and the private equity owners who had built it (Hellman & Friedman and Advent) took Nexi paper rather than cash, becoming its largest shareholders. SIA brought the Italian interbank infrastructure.

The three-way combination was the European answer to Fiserv, FIS and Global Payments: a domestic champion in each large market rolled into one listed company, with the cost savings of shared platforms and the argument that scale would hold margins against Adyen and the platform acquirers taking online merchants.

## What it left behind

A company with the volume of a European champion and the share price of a company that had paid for it in paper at the top of the market: Nexi's shares fell by more than half over the next two years as the fintech multiple compressed, and the integration of three processors' platforms became the story. It is the European reference case for a wave-driven merger of equals — the strategy was sound and the timing, as with Block–Afterpay, was the cost.

— Ihor Vlasov, M&A FinTech Expert. Last reviewed 2026-09-20. https://mahouse.world/authors/ihor-vlasov