November 2011: Morpho Cards, one of the world’s leading suppliers of identification, detection and e-document solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of the French multinational SAFRAN, agrees to acquire Carvajal Group’s banking card manufacturing and personalization centers in Colombia and Peru for a total of $28 million.
With this strategic move, Morpho increases its regional presence in the high growth South American banking markets as they undergo chip migration to EMV(Europay, MasterCard and VISA), the global standard for credit and debit payment cards based on chip card technology. This acquisition allows Morpho’s to answer the increasing demand by these financial markets to have local technological and service support as the leading financial services providers move towards more secure payment transactions based on chip card technology.
The transaction results from a competitive sales process in which Global M&A advised Morpho/SAFRAN on all tactical aspects as well as all the commercial and financial aspects of the transaction. We also identified a transaction partner which was able to purchase simultaneously a non-strategic asset and which was included in the perimeter of the transaction by the vendor’s advisors. The GMA team assigned to the transaction included partners from GMA’s Columbian office, who led the execution and a partner from the Madrid office, who sourced the transaction opportunity.
