EQT Growth’s investment in Mollie: Enabling Europe’s e-commerce evolution
The e-commerce sector is a perfect example of EQT Growth’s thesis that digital transformation is ubiquitous, disruptive and accelerating. Almost wherever you look across Europe, e-commerce penetration is increasing and these trends have accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, in 2020 the annual growth rate of e-commerce almost doubled compared to the year before and we are convinced that this trend is here to stay.
When thinking about investing in technology-enabled sectors, we feel that supporting disruptors is the most attractive part of the digital value chain. It’s an approach we’ve been taking for years here at EQT — take for example Banking Circle, a company EQT acquired in 2018, which is a high growth fintech business disrupting the traditional correspondent banking system for international money transfer and clearing. This is also why we find digital payments to be one area of the e-commerce sector that is particularly exciting.
Europe’s payment sector is particularly ripe for disruption. In many European countries legacy incumbents control significant market share, despite having limited technology offerings — for example, over a third of merchants in the Netherlands and around half in Belgium, Germany and France still use legacy providers. This presents a clear opportunity for tech-first platforms, although the unique demands of each individual country in Europe is a challenge for payments providers without localised expertise.
It’s one that Mollie has overcome. The Amsterdam headquartered payment service provider (PSP) has a uniquely localised offering, which includes directly integrated local payment methods, local language interfaces, and local customer support and sales teams. Mollie uses this approach to serve businesses of all sizes across Europe, with a focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Its highly differentiated set of features offers smooth onboarding processes and incorporates an extensive suite of plugins and integrations with common SME platforms. The Company also has a tech-forward extensible product, enabling developers to build on top of Mollie’s interface and tailor the product to their unique needs.
Mollie serves more than 120,000 active merchants across Europe, making it one of the largest PSPs on the continent, and is experiencing exceptional growth, having doubled its revenues in 2020. In doing so it has enabled tens of thousands to benefit from better and easier access to online financial services, a benefit that is particularly important to smaller businesses. For instance, it has been shown that small independent physical retailers with an online store are more likely to have increased their sales in the past three years than retailers without an online presence, regardless of the type of store.
EQT Growth is extremely proud to have invested in Mollie as part of its USD 800 million Series C round, which values the Company at USD 6.5 billion. We will leverage our deep networks in local European markets to help drive Mollie’s accelerated international expansion, as well as using our strong in-house digital marketing and tech teams to support Mollie’s digitalization. We’ll also employ our unique experience in scaling innovative, international fintechs — including Banking Circle, Bought By Many, Vault and VBill — as Mollie continues its journey to becoming Europe’s leading SME payments platform.
We firmly believe that Mollie is primed to become Europe’s leading payments company and one of the continent’s next technology champions. We can’t wait to get to work supporting the Mollie team. If you also want to join Mollie on its journey, they’re hiring! Find out more, here.
