Fiserv Inc. agreed to acquire CashEdge Inc., a provider of consumer and business payments technologies, for $465 million.

The acquisition is expected to expand the range of digital payments services that Fiserv customers can offer to consumers and businesses that want the ability to transact anytime, anywhere. These value-added services will also create potential opportunities for financial institutions to generate additional fee revenue, the company said.

CashEdge adds to Fiserv's capabilities in areas such as account-to-account transfer, account opening and funding, data aggregation, small business payments, and person-to-person payments. Both companies are in-market today with financial institution-centric P2P services that enable payments to be made from one account to another, Fiserv with ZashPay and CashEdge with Popmoney. This combination should accelerate Fiserv's ability to provide new capabilities such as P2P money request, and small business electronic invoicing and remittance.

“CashEdge provides an attractive suite of solutions to further enable the delivery of a highly differentiated payments experience for financial institutions and their customers, as well as accelerate the coming P2P movement,” said Jeffery Yabuki, president and CEO, Fiserv. “Importantly, we share a common vision for new payment solutions enabled by a financial institution-centric platform.”

“We believe that the payments industry has reached a pivotal point in the evolution of consumer and small business payments, and the merger of our efforts will significantly enhance our ability to deliver innovative solutions to our financial institution clients,” said Sanjeev Dheer, cofounder, CEO, and president of CashEdge.

The transaction is currently expected to be completed by September 2011, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Fiserv expects that the transaction will be neutral to adjusted earnings per share in 2011 and accretive to adjusted earnings per share in 2012.

CashEdge provides services to more than 500 clients, including many of the nation’s largest banks.

http://investors.fiserv.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=588125