Fidelity acquires Metavante
2009/04/01
Bart Narter
The boldness of this move is a shocker. FIS has a market cap of $3.32 billion. Metavante (NYSE:MV) has a market cap of $2.7 billion (as of today's announcement). If someone were acquired, I would have imagined it to be Jack Henry or Open Solutions, which are much smaller companies with core systems that would be folded into a portfolio. Metavante has a large hosted system, which Fidelity doesn't really have. Fidelity hosts Fiserv's ITI Premier. Fidelity may resent writing checks to Fiserv and this would be a way out with their own hosted platform. Convincing their Premier customers to move is another matter…. I would expect that Metavante IBS (core) would be integrated into Fidelity Xpress middleware and therefore the Touchpoint Sales and Service, Internet Banking, etc. In order to truly benefit from scale, platform consolidation will be necessarly. Both Fidelity and Metavante have payments business. Fidelity has Certegy and eFunds among others. Metavante has NYCE and card processing. I am most interested to see how the organizations are merged.