Worldline Acquisition of Ingenico
An Analysis Group team provided economic and competitive analysis in Wordline’s successful proposal to acquire Ingenico, a rival payment services and point-of-sale terminal provider. The team, led by Managing Principal Antoine Chapsal, Principal Emmanuel Frot, and Manager Mario Luca, evaluated the combined market power of the merged entity in the firms’ vertically integrated and closely related markets for payments processing and merchant acquisition. The economic modeling results demonstrated that the combined entity would have neither the ability nor the incentives to foreclose competitors, and that doing so would result in large losses that would not be offset by any meaningful gains. The EU approved the merger, conditional on divestitures in Austria, Belgium, and Luxembourg.