• Skroutz, a leading marketplace in Greece, acquired the remaining 75% share capital of Greek fintech EveryPay, completing a full buyout after starting the process two years prior.
• The investment is in line with Skroutz’s strategy to offer an innovative and secure payment solution for its growing customer base.
• The partnership explores the industry-wide synergies between e-commerce and fintechs, especially in the payments area.
When it comes to shopping online in Greece, Skroutz is one of the first companies that spring to mind. Back in 2005, when George Hadjigeorgiou (CEO) founded the company, there were only 12 online e-shops around. For him, it started as an engineering challenge to build a website offering price comparisons, he shared in a previous interview for Starttech.vc.
Together with his co-founders George Avgoustidis and Vasilis Dimos, they built Skroutz into a one-stop e-commerce business, with 3.5 million registered consumers and 12K partner online shops.
As the company grew, providing security and reliability of online transactions, and a seamless payment experience for the shopper were deemed essential. That’s where the synergy with a trusted fintech player became clear.
“The extension of our partnership with EveryPay will further contribute to the implementation of our goals for security in electronic transactions, as well as help us to include new innovative payment solutions for partners and our users. We remain committed to our vision of providing quality secure services that make the consumer’s online shopping experience unique and at the same time we are also investing in a company that has the potential to further evolve in the FinTech industry,” Kostas Kontogiannis, Chief Financial Officer of Skroutz, announced.
Meanwhile, EveryPay was founded in 2014, by Athanasios Panagiotopoulos (CEO), one of the Fortune 40 under 40 list of Greek business leaders, together with entrepreneur and academic Grigoris Siourounis (Chairman of the Board of Directors), and Minas Kitsos.
EveryPay offers a white label platform solution that combines multiple services, such as E-POS, V-POS, email payments, and one click pay through tokenization. They are a fully licensed PSP, with one of the fastest payment gateways in Europe and the most advanced in Greece.
Their expertise in payment services in a marketplace environment was the key factor leading to the strategic collaboration with Skroutz. “True to our vision, we will continue our plan to create an integrated electronic payment service ecosystem, providing secure and fast transactions for both the consumer and the merchant,” Grigorios Siourounis announced.
Following the acquisition, EveryPay will continue its existing development plan, while adding to their R&D efforts around new applications in the fintech area, with focus on making payments easier and safer for consumers and businesses.
Where e-commerce and fintechs converge
E-commerce and fintech businesses share a history of competition, synergy, and more recently, convergence.
Traditionally, e-commerce has opened new markets to fintechs in the payments niche. Yet in recent years we’ve seen e-commerce businesses tapping more and more into the fintech market for ways to improve their customer experience and find new revenue streams. Sometimes, this happens through developing their own payment solutions (think of behemoths like Apple, Samsung, Amazon). Other times, e-coms and fintechs realize the benefits of combining their strengths through partnership models.
E-commerce businesses bring to the table broader and sticky customer bases, while fintechs also bring their higher risk tolerance, speed, and flexibility in reacting to market changes. This synergy was shown during the recent pandemic, when fintechs were quick to innovate and solve customer needs such as contactless and online payments.
Elsewhere in the world, the convergence between e-commerce and fintechs can be seen in the increasing number of deals. We’ve spotted merchant commerce platform Pine Labs acquiring e-commerce and fintech company Fave to expand globally together; Amazon aggregator Thrasio acquiring fintech startup Yardline to provide growth capital and business optimization tools to its e-commerce sellers, and even a finance firm, MatchMove, acquiring e-commerce specialist Shopmatic to create a finance and e-commerce powerhouse.
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