Visa (V) agreed today to buy CyberSource (CYBS) for about $2 billion in cash to improve its offering of online transaction services and help fight fraud. Visa will pay $26/share, about 34% higher than CyberSource’s closing price yesterday. CyberSource generated about $265 million of revenue in 2009, up from $229 million in 2008.
ABOUT CYBERSOURCE:
CyberSource Corporation provides electronic payment and risk management solutions to enterprise and small business merchants primarily in the United States and Europe. Its payment solutions include CyberSource Advanced that enables merchants to accept payments made by various credit and debit cards, as well as to accept payments by corporate procurement cards, electronic checks, PayPal Express Checkout, and the Bill Me Later service. The company’s fraud management solutions comprise CyberSource Decision Manager, a hosted rules and case management system that allows business managers to automatically screen and route orders for acceptance, rejection, or review; performance monitoring and screening management; and chargeback recovery services, as well as payment security management solutions, such as payment tokenization with remote secure storage, hosted payment acceptance services, and systems centralization and managed hosting services. It also provides business and technical consulting services, such as technology selection, business process design, devising merchant-specific risk management strategies, systems installation, integration of products and services with a merchants existing internal systems, building custom reporting tools, disaster recovery planning, system centralization, and security consulting. In addition, the company owns Authorize.Net, which enables merchants to authorize, settle, and manage credit card and electronic check payments via web sites, retail stores, mail order/telephone order call centers, and mobile devices, as well as CyberSource Simple Order Processing API to enable the secure communication of order data from the customers systems to its systems; and Simple Commerce Messaging Protocol to enable secure connections between its systems and the customers systems. CyberSource was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif.–COURTESY OF YAHOO! FINANCE