Spectrum Equity Announces Sale of Ethoca to Mastercard

Boston and San Francisco – Spectrum Equity, a leading growth equity firm, is pleased to announce that the previously announced acquisition of Ethoca by Mastercard has closed.

Ethoca is the leading, global provider of collaboration-based technology that enables card issuers, ecommerce merchants and online businesses to increase card acceptance, stop fraud, recover lost revenue and eliminate chargebacks from both fraud and customer disputes. Ethoca’s suite of services delivers significant revenue growth and cost saving opportunities to more than 5,400 merchants in 40+ countries and more than 4,000 card issuers in 20+ countries.

Spectrum Equity originally led a minority recapitalization of Ethoca in May of 2015 to partner with the management team to accelerate revenue growth through direct and partnership channels and to support product innovation. During Spectrum Equity's four year partnership with the Ethoca management team, the company executed on several strategic initiatives, including growing the number of merchants and issuers participating in the global collaboration network, and launching Eliminator, a real time data network enabling ecommerce merchants and card issuers to collaborate and reduce disputes and friendly fraud.

“Ethoca’s mission has always been to help card issuers and online merchants increase card acceptance and stop ecommerce fraud to simplify and improve the payment process,” said Andre Edelbrock, Ethoca CEO. “As a partner, Spectrum Equity understood the complexities of our market segment and provided deep domain expertise and advice at every stage of our global expansion.”

“Andre and the entire management team have built a very special company at Ethoca, and we are proud to have played a role in supporting the company’s many successes over the past several years. Ethoca has an incredible growth opportunity ahead, and now as part of Mastercard they have the resources of one of the leading global payments companies behind them. We wish the team much continued success going forward,” said Chris Mitchell, Spectrum Equity Managing Director.

With the sale to Mastercard, Ethoca joins several other category defining Spectrum Equity portfolio companies that have been acquired by leading strategic buyers of risk and compliance software and data businesses, including BMI Research (acquired by Fitch Ratings), RiskMetrics (acquired by MSCI), Seisint (acquired by Lexis Nexis) and World-Check (acquired by Thomson Reuters).

For more information on the transaction, refer to the press release issued by Mastercard.