Italy's UniCredit has entered into a binding agreement to acquire the entire share capital of European Banking-as-a-Service platform Vodeno and Belgian digital bank Aion.
Together, Aion/Vodeno offer a suite of embedded banking products based on Aion’s ECB licence that enables everything from payments to accounts to lending, and clients can also leverage Aion's balance sheet and liquidity for BaaS lending.
Aion Bank and Vodeno are separate companies, but share the same investors - previously Warburg Pincus, NatWest Group and EBRD.
The combined purchase price for the 100% acquisition of the companies is around €370m. The deal will see 200 engineers, developers and data scientists move across to UniCredit.
Andrea Orcel, chief executive officer of UniCredit says: "This investment enables us to leverage Vodeno's technology and talent to further develop their proprietary technology using it as a sandbox to develop, test and innovate for the benefit of our broader group. The combination of Aion Bank with the integrated technology provides the route to enter targeted client segments and entire markets across Europe, providing additional opportunities to attractively deploy our excess capital."
The Vodeno Cloud Platform is a cloud-native core banking system built with smart contracts technology and API-based, integrated with the processes and procedures of a fully-fledged bank.
The technology currently supports NatWest's embedded banking platform Boxed following a strategic agreement with Vodeno that was sealed in October 2022. NatWest invested £120 million to get the project up and running and held an 82% share in the venture. The implications for the business following UniCredit's takeover of Vodeno have not been elaborated on