VeriFone Systems Inc. announced the completion of its acquisition of payment and gateway service provider Point. VeriFone signed an agreement to purchase Point back in November.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Point is Northern Europe's largest provider of payment and gateway services with operations in 11 European countries and nearly 475,000 merchant contracts. Point services include point-of-sale technology and support, card encryption services and e-commerce processing.

VeriFone's CEO Douglas G. Bergeron said the Point acquisition supports the company's vision of offering retailers everywhere a managed service to easily accept all existing payment types including alternative and mobile payment methods from both card brands and new entrants in payments such as Google, Isis and PayPal.

"The new entrants can take advantage of easy and accelerated access to VeriFone's worldwide installation of more than 20 million merchant lanes," Bergeron said.

The company said Point will operate as a VeriFone company. Additionally, VeriFone said it will extend the Point platform, eventually creating the world's largest infrastructure for rapid deployment of alternative payments and NFC mobile commerce.

According to announcement, the Point acquisition, along with existing VeriFone debt, was financed through a credit agreement for $1.5 billion led by J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, Wells Fargo Securities LLC, Barclays Capital and RBC Capital Markets.

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