American Express to acquire Nipendo

This acquisition will allow American Express to connect to Nipendo’s platform, offering their customers the possibility to communicate and automate Procure-to-Pay processes easily, including accounts payable and receivable.

The Nipendo platform will work with the company’s systems, allowing users to maintain, manage, and supervise their current payments infrastructure, while benefiting from additional automation. American Express will use the technology, team, services, and capabilities of Nipendo to expand into new geographies and to differentiate offerings for business and merchants. 

The acquisition is expected to close within the fiscal quarter.

American Express’s expansion strategy 

American Express is a globally integrated payments processor and card scheme that offers its customers and clients access to various insights, experiences, and services. 

Following the agreement, American Express aims to offer their clients a more efficient end-to-end business-to-business (B2B) platform, where they can make payments and transfers faster and more secure. This will allow businesses to give their customers common ground to connect and transact on the Amex network as well. 

The company launched the new digital B2B payments ecosystem called Amex Business Link in December of 2022. The network makes managing payments easier and faster for buyers and suppliers of all sizes, by accepting card and non-card payments, with transactions that can be domestic and cross-border. 

Earlier in the same month, the announcement that ASIC sued American Express was made. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has sued the company alleging the fact that credit cards were issued and distributed to customers without ensuring they are understood. 

The Australian securities regulator alleged that AmEx was aware that two of the credit cards that were made by the company raised confusion among the customers because they seemed to be cobranded with a retailer. As per the information provided by Reiters, American Express knew that the customers would not be able to discern whether they wanted a loyalty card, or a credit card. This failed to have a distribution limited to customers who were looking for a card that gives further benefits, along with offering points for every transaction.

Nipendo’s services

Based in Israel, Nipendo developed a cloud-based platform designed as an intelligent intermediator that would streamline interactions between businesses and offer them benefits at a minimal cost. This is possible because of the technologies that are used within the company, such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), Machine Learning, and AI (Artificial Intelligence).

Nipendo offers their customers the possibility to reduce costs, by automating their purchase-to-pay processes and replace manual labour with smart-bots that operate according to corporate policy, compliance rules, and regulations. Furthermore, the businesses can benefit from S2P processes that are touch-free, compliance management and enforcement, audit and validation, dispute resolution, process governance and discrepancy management.