Good morning, Hubsters. Happy Monday. MK Flynn here on the Wire. Let’s kick the week off with some insights into the forces driving tech deals in the banking sector. Mission-critical. One Equity Partners is buying ACI Worldwide’s corporate online banking offerings for $100 million in cash. The deal was announced last week and is expected to close in the third quarter, when the target will operate independently under the new name, Dragonfly Financial Technologies. I reached out to Chip Schorr, senior managing director, for his thoughts. Dragonfly “is a gem,” Schorr said. “The solutions are mission-critical to their banking customers, and those banks’ important corporate customers, enabling seamless electronic payment management. We believe ACI did a terrific job replatforming the offerings and creating a leading cloud-based solution with a deep feature set. This is a solution purpose built for the next twenty years, with significant opportunities to add adjacencies to offer the customers an even deeper solution set. Furthermore, Dragonfly is one of a limited number of players with the full capabilities required to service the needs of the leading financial institutions.” For more, read the full interview. Natural gas. Warburg Pincus recently invested $320 million into Viridi Energy, a renewable natural gas platform, to scale up decarbonization efforts. PE Hub’s Obey Martin Manayiti caught up with the firm’s principal, Jeffrey Luse – who focuses on energy investments – to hear more about the deal and how Warburg Pincus plans to grow the platform. “We will be using natural gas for a long time, and understanding the most capital-efficient ways to reduce our carbon footprint is really important,” he said. “Renewable natural gas is proving to be one of the best methods to do that.” Read the whole story here. Seller’s market. The gap in expectations between buyers and sellers may be widening, according to the latest Private Capital Pulse Survey from BDO. “While deal activity is expected to return to more ‘normal’ levels in 2022, fund managers foresee challenges in what continues to be a seller’s market,” the BDO report said. “Gaps between buyer and seller expectations is ranked as their top challenge to closing deals. At PE Hub, we’ll be watching to see how this all plays out in deals. I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s valuations. As always, please email me at mk.flynn@peimedia.com. Until tomorrow, MK Read the full wire commentary on PE Hub ... |