The company began life as Pivotal Payments and was established in 2003 by Phillip Fayer. Fayer founded the company after taking a stint off his time at university. From the offset, Nuvei was focused on what it is to this day: electronic payment processing and merchant services for point of sale and online businesses.
In 2006, the company gained an investment from Goldman Sachs totaling CA$60m, which helped the company execute several acquisitions by 2010. The company grew to about 300 employees in Canada and the US, reporting a yearly revenue of CA$150m.
The next big expansion occurred in 2017 when Montreal-based private equity firm Novacap teamed up with a Québec public pension fund manager to launch a joint venture into the company. These two investment firms valued the company at CA$525m.
The new influx of money allowed Nuvei to expand further – in 2019, Nuvei purchased SafeCharge, an electronic money institution, for $1.1bn. In 2020, the company entered the Nasdaq and raised US$700m on its initial public offering on the Toronto stock exchange. It closed at CA$5.7bn making it one of Canada’s most valuable publicly traded companies.
Nuvei’s stock continued to rise as it bought out competitors such as Smart2Pay, a payments service provider and BaseCommerce, a payment processing company in 2020. The next year they acquired Simplex, a crypto exchange platform, for $250m.
In August 2021, Nuvei completed the acquisition of payment provider Mazooma, a transaction that expanded its portfolio in North America, quickly followed by its purchase of Paymentez as it made inroads into Latin America.
Key personnel:
Chief Operating Officer, Digital Payments: Max Attias
Chief Data & Analytics Officer: Netanel Kabala
Chief Corporate Development Officer: Neil Erlick
Chief People Officer: Nikki Zinman
President: Yuval Ziv
President (North America): Mark Pyke
Company size: 1300+
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