A new owner will be writing the cheques for employees at Beanstream Internet Commerce after the firm's parent company was sold.
Minneapolis-based Digital River has paid $102.8 million for Vancouver's LML Payment Systems, parent company of the largely Victoria-based Beanstream.
The deal, to be finalized later this year, adds online payment processing for small-to mid-sized businesses to Digital River's existing services of payment processing for enterprise and mid-sized clients.
The combination will enable Digital River to broaden its online payment services to businesses of all sizes and, collectively, the
companies will handle more than $20 billion in online transactions.
"Each company has a strong reputation in the online payments market, robust platform and deep expertise in card-not-present processing," said Joel Ronning, CEO of Digital River. "Our joint technologies and expert resources will create even more value for our combined client bases - helping them reduce time to market and providing access to new payments technologies and geographies."
With the transaction, Digital River acquires Beanstream, which was founded in Victoria in 2000.
The company, which has 40 employees here and 60 in total, was acquired by LML Payment Systems in 2007.
"We're really excited about this," said Craig Thomson, president of Beanstream. "Beanstream's secret sauce of innovative thinking, bulletproof payment systems and worldclass customer service will remain in place. But now we have access to a bigger stage and global opportunities. Digital River has 1,600 employees and a significant footprint in 20 countries around the world."
The transaction will see LML Payment Systems shareholders receive $3.45 US per share. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies, but is subject to approval of two-thirds of the LML shareholder votes cast.
