Digital payment processor PayPal agreed to acquire its Japan-based consumer finance service portfolio company Paidy for about $2.7bn. The deal is expected to definitively close during the fourth quarter of 2021. Paidy will continue to operate under the leadership of its founder and executive chairman Russell Cummer and president and CEO Riku Sugie.
Launched in 2008, Paidy offers a buy-now-pay-later service that enables its customers to make instant credit purchases, which they can repay on a monthly basis. PayPal plans to use this acquisition to strengthen its capabilities and presence in the domestic payments market in Japan.
Paidy is part of the broader payment tech space, which has enjoyed much interest from corporate investors over the past decade but from which we had only began to see a growing number of exits last year, as our GCV Analytics chart below illustrates. In 2020, we tracked 23 exits from that space, worth an estimated total of $7.3bn, well above the 4 exits, worth an estimated $381m in 2019. This momentum, fostered by the effect of the covid-19 pandemic and the massive liquidity injections in public and private markets that ensued, has been sustained through 2021 so far. By the end of August, we had tracked 18 exits, worth an estimated total of $7.74bn.
