Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Hogan Lovells have taken key roles as Advent International and Bain Capital Private Equity have agreed to purchase Concardis for a reported $745m.
The acquisition of the German firm is the latest in a run of purchases of payment providers including Worldpay. Concardis’ transaction volume grew 20% in the past two years from €35.2bn to €41.9bn.
Concardis was owned by a group of German private banks, co-operative banks, savings banks and DZ Bank. Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank coordinated the selling shareholders and were advised by Hogan Lovells. Hogan Lovells’s team was led by corporate partner Tim Brandi in Frankfurt.
Weil acted for Advent and Bain again, with a team comprising both German and London partners. In Germany managing partner Gerhard Schmidt acted on the deal with partners Stephan Grauke, Christian Tappeiner, Barbara Jaegersberger, Uwe Hartmann and Tobias Geerling. In London Advent’s go to man Marco Compagnoni and Tom Richards acted on the purchase.
Compagnoni said: ‘[Advent and Bain] have had a series of excellent deals in the transactions sector, such as Worldpay, this is yet another.’
Other recent Weil mandates for Advent and Bain include the acquisition and subsequent exit by IPO of Worldpay, the €2.15bn acquisition of Italian payment services provider ICBPI in 2015 and the €1.1bn purchase of Italian payment processing company Setefi in 2016 from Intesa Sanpaolo.
The US firm recently acted on OMERS first European private equity exit as it sold V.Group to Advent. Weil acted for the private equity arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, while Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer took a spot acting for Advent with London private equity head Adrian Maguire taking the lead.
victoria.young@legalease.co.uk
Read more: ‘The M&A Report: Private equity offers the clients for all seasons’
