William Blair acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Currencies Direct, a portfolio company of Corsair and Palamon Capital Partners, in connection with its strategic investment from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities (Blackstone). The transaction was signed on March 7, 2022 and is expected to close on March 25, 2022.
About the Companies
Currencies Direct is a leading player disrupting the traditional banking industry by offering a superior value proposition to consumers and businesses for their FX and international payment requirements. The Company focuses on high-value consumer use cases and segments of the FX market, as well as recurring SME FX use cases. Currencies Direct combines a full-stack, fully digital product offering (including multi-currency digital wallet, API-led B2B and B2B2C platforms) with an award-winning premium customer service, including MoneyAge’s “Money Transfer Provider of the Year” accolade. Since its inception in 1996 and with offices across five continents, Currencies Direct has worked with more than 425,000 customers, growing substantially through a 3,500-strong B2B2C affiliate network, delivering consistently high customer revenue retention and broadening its go-to-market strategy across B2B, B2C and B2B2C channels.
Corsair is a global specialist investment firm offering opportunities for investors and solutions for companies across financial & business services and infrastructure. The firm has almost three decades of experience partnering with businesses at the crossroads of technology transformation and financial services complexity and established its complementary infrastructure investment practice in 2015. Corsair has invested $12 billion in capital across its global buyouts and infrastructure platforms since inception.
Palamon Capital Partners is an independent private equity partnership founded in 1999, which is focused on providing equity for European growing asset-light service companies, investing across tech-enabled financial services, tech-enabled B2B & healthcare and consumer & education. Palamon originates, executes and manages investments on a pan-European basis, with a particular focus on the UK, Germany, Benelux, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Sweden.
Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager. Blackstone seeks to create positive economic impact and long-term value for their investors, the companies they invest in, and the communities in which they work. Blackstone achieves this by using extraordinary people and flexible capital to help companies solve problems. Blackstone’s $881 billion in assets under management include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, infrastructure, life sciences, growth equity, opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds, all on a global basis.
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