Italian bank UniCredit has inked a binding agreement to acquire Belgian digital native Aion Bank and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider Vodeno for the sum of approximately €370 million.
The Milan-based commercial bank says its purchase brings a “next generation core banking technology” and an improved embedded finance offering into its remit “without any dependencies from third party core banking providers”.
Vodeno and Aion Bank have maintained a close partnership within the same group, with Vodeno utilising the digital bank’s full EU banking licence in Belgium to provide fully regulated banking services throughout Europe through its cloud-native, fully API-based BaaS platform.
Aion Bank itself also leverages the platform within its core banking operations, payment processing and customer onboarding functions. The group is backed by private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
The deal announced with UniCredit this week includes the entire share capital of both companies, along with 200 engineers, developers and data scientists, and is expected to close in Q4 2024.
Explaining the rationale behind the purchases, UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel says the bank plans to leverage Vodeno in a sandbox capacity to “develop, test and innovate for the benefit of our broader group”.
He adds that the technology combination with Aion Bank will pave UniCredit’s entry into “targeted client segments and entire markets across Europe” with “additional opportunities to attractively deploy our excess capital”.