Portland fintech ZipLine acquired by Atlanta firm
Photo / Tim Greenway
ZipLine CEO Stephen Goodrich at the company’s Portland headquarters, said his company is confident that PDI "Is the perfect match for our best-in-class payment platform."
ZipLine, a Portland-based payment technology firm that processes more than 6 million transactions a month for retailers including Circle K, Cumberland Farms and Irving Oil, has been acquired by Atlanta-based Professional Datasolutions Inc.
The acquisition was announced by the buyer, which provides enterprise software for the convenience retail and petroleum wholesale market, and comes six years after Stephen Goodrich bought Florida-based National Payment Card Association, which he moved to Portland and renamed ZipLine.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Over the weekend, PDI spokesman Cederick Johnson told Mainebiz that the acquisition includes all 61 ZipLine employees, bringing PDI's total to 1,000.
He said that PDI has made 17 acquisitions over the last few years to expand its solutions portfolio, extend its global reach and provide local presence in local markets and serve customers better.
Before ZipLine, PDI's most recent recent acquisition was SwiftIQ, a Chicago-based provider of analytics cloud and vendor collaboration software and services.
Asked how ZipLine got onto PDI's radar, Johnson told Mainebiz, "We continuously examine our business and how to best grow our offerings, either organically or through acquisitions, to meet our customers' needs. ZipLine presented an opportunity for us to accelerate our growth strategy and get into the payments space, which is an important part our customers' solution ecosystem."
He also noted that the firms share many of the same customers, and that "our customers are asking us to more tightly integrate payments and loyalty."
PDI 'the perfect match' for ZipLine
In a news release, Goodrich called PDI "the perfect match for our best-in-class payment platform."
He added: "The combination of both entities will strongly support our merchant partners in enhancing the guest experience and brand affinity."
Brandon Logsdon, PDI's president and general manager for marketing cloud solutions said that "with the addition of ZipLine, we have built a holistic ecosystem that begins with a mobile transaction at the pump, includes consumer loyalty, CRM [customer relationship management[ and offers that provide total transaction visibility in the back office, enabling unmatched insights. This is extremely meaningful to our market.”
Integration plans
Asked whether the ZipLine name and Portland presence will remain, he said that ZipLine will adopt PDI's corporate brand, and the plan is to fully integrate the technology into PDI's marketing cloud platform as quickly as possible.
"Concerning the Portland office," he said, "we are not making any immediate decisions. The location strategy will be addressed as part of the integration process in the coming months.
ZipLine's financial advisor on the transaction was Cowen.
PDI did not disclose its advisors.
ZipLine is one of several financial technology firms based in Portland, from small startups to global player WEX Inc. (NYSE: WEX), forming what SCORE Portland chapter chair Nancy Strojny has described as "an amazing niche of fintech companies, due to the intersection of talent and technology."
The sector has had its shares of ups and downs, with credit card processing company Evo Payments Inc. (Nasdaq: EVOP), earlier this year unveiling plans to lay off nearly 140 workers, Mainebiz reported in January.
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