Monday, February 25, 2013
TSYS processes bankcard payments for eight of the top 10 financial institutions in the United States and over half of the top 20 international banks. NetSpend holds a similar place in its sphere of influence, as it is second only to Green Dot Corp. in the U.S. general purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid card market, with approximately 2.4 million active accounts, a distribution network of 500 retailers and more than 130,000 reload locations.
By folding NetSpend into TSYS as a separate business unit, the processor said it will be able to expand and diversify its product offerings, as well as take greater advantage of the GPR card market's upward trajectory – a market that is projected to grow 20 percent each year in the next four years. Philip W. Tomlinson, chairman of the board and Chief Executive Officer at TSYS, called the acquisition agreement a "transformational moment" for the processor.
In the conference call, TSYS President and Chief Operating Officer M. Troy Woods noted that TSYS has been processing prepaid card payments for the last 10 years. "By acquiring NetSpend, TSYS expands beyond prepaid processing into one of the fastest growing segments – program management," he said.
According to Woods, NetSpend's PM capabilities extend to four main areas: retail, partner, direct and paycard. The largest percentage of NetSpend's business (49 percent) comes from GPR cards distributed through alternative financial service providers, such as cash advance stores and insurance lenders. The other slices of NetSpend's pie consist of the online and direct sales channel (25 percent), the corporate payroll card market (18 percent) and the traditional retail merchant channel (8 percent).
Woods added that NetSpend possesses the "most robust" GPR card reload network in the industry. By becoming a PM via NetSpend, TSYS will increase its market opportunity by a factor of eight to 10, according to Woods. "Together, we believe our market position will be formidable," he said.
During the conference call's question and answer session, Woods characterized the acquisition as "not a consolidation M&A play, but an innovation M&A play." Adam Rust, Research Director for the Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina, takes a different view.
In a Feb. 19 BankTalk blog post, Rust said big banks in recent years have not renewed long-standing processing deals with TSYS. Since 2006, TSYS clients Bank of America NA, JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo have not re-signed with TSYS, but instead consolidated services by taking processing in-house, according to Rust.
While TSYS rebounded with a new BofA contract and other deals with international banks, including Scotia Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland, Rust said "companies like TSYS are always at risk of seeing their margins compressed by the purchasing power of the big banks."
The NetSpend purchase, where TSYS secures all of NetSpend's retail distribution relationships, could thus be seen as a bulwark against big banks gobbling up more of TSYS' business.
Rust is not altogether surprised by this acquisition development. In a Feb. 27, 2102, BankTalk blog post, Rust wondered if NetSpend was gearing up to be sold. He based that opinion on NetSpend's annual financial statement for 2011, where he said the PM disclosed in an otherwise upbeat report that the company experienced no new GPR card growth, had reduced salaries and had authorized two corporate stock buybacks to shareholders.
Rust said that, as a general rule, companies confident about future prospects reinvest stock back into the company rather than take money out. 
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