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Finastra provides software used in areas such as mortgage lending, payments, and retail banking.
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Barry Rodrigues, a former senior payments executive at
Barclays
and
Citigroup
,
is joining Finastra, a fintech backed by Vista Equity Partners, two people familiar with the situation said.
Finastra has hired Rodrigues to run its payments business, one of the people said.
Rodrigues is the former CEO of Barclays Cards & Payments. He is also the ex-head of digital payments at Citigroup (ticker: C) and spent 25 years at
American Express
(AXP), where he was most recently president of global network services.
Vista Equity, the software-focused private-equity firm founded by Robert Smith, created Finastra when it acquired DH Corp in 2017 and merged it with Misys, a company in its portfolio. Finastra, of London, provides software used in areas such as mortgage lending, payments, and retail banking for many of the world’s leading banks.
Finastra is a sizable fintech, with about 8,600 customers including many of the world’s top banks. It produces $1.85 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 9,000 people.
The company, however, is highly leveraged, according to a Fitch Ratings report from April. Finastra’s debt is a little less than $6 billion, the report said.
The company has been trying to pay down this debt. In 2019, Vista tried to sell as much as 50% of Finastra, valuing the fintech at $10 billion, according to reports. That sale of a stake was expected to lead to an initial public offering or possible sale of the whole company. Vista Equity postponed the Finastra sale in April 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bloomberg reported that spring.
This year, Vista has sought a buyer for Finastra’s capital markets business. The unit provides technology that seeks to improve trading, as well as monitoring and compliance, for its clients, including large banks. The Finastra business was expected to sell for 10 to 15 times revenue, or $3 billion to $4.5 billion, Barron’s reported in July.
Credit Suisse
is advising on the process. The capital-markets operation received interest from multiple parties, a different person familiar with the situation said.
Whether Vista will find a buyer is unclear. As recently as November, Finastra was in exclusive discussions to sell the unit to Veritas Capital, the buyout shop that recently sold athenahealth for $17 billion, four other people said. Some said negotiations with Veritas have broken down while others said the process is continuing.
Another effort to sell a capital-markets business seems to have found a buyer.
Fidelity National Information Services
(FIS) appears to be near a deal to sell its capital markets business to the private-equity firm Symphony Technology Group, Bloomberg said on Nov. 24. The deal is valued at nearly $2 billion. FIS and Symphony didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Write to Luisa Beltran at luisa.beltran@dowjones.com
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