In what will be the bank's first major financial technology acquisition, J.P. Morgan agreed to buy WePay.
WePay, a Silicon Valley-based financial technology firm founded in 2008 and led by CEO Bill Clerico, delivers payments-as-a-service application programming interfaces (APIs) for simple on-boarding and activation of payments.
The U.S. bank plans to roll out WePay's technology to J.P. Morgan's JPM) four million small-business customers. The two companies did not disclose terms of the deal. But a person familiar with the matter said the price was above the roughly $220 million valuation that Redwood City, Calif.-based WePay achieved in a 2015 fundraising.
Active Fintech Investor
Although JPM's chief executive Jamie Dimon recently called bitcoin a fraud, the outspoken CEO does approve of blockchain and sees it being beneficial to banking in the long term.
While JPM hasn't made many large acquisitions of fintech companies, it has been an active investor in financial technology startups. Over the past 12 months, it participated in a $100 million fundraising for business-to-business payments firm Bill.com Inc. and a $50 million fundraising for LevelUp, which enables customers to pay at restaurants and coffee shops using their smartphones.
