Dive Brief:
- Deluxe is buying payments processor Celero Commerce for $625 million as the check company further diversifies its revenue mix into payment services amid a broader U.S. shift away from paper checks.
- With Celero – a payment processing software firm – Deluxe’s payments and data businesses will contribute 57% of overall company revenue this year, compared to 31% in 2020, Deluxe said in a Thursday press release. Deluxe said it will borrow $375 million to help fund the all-cash purchase, with closing expected in the third quarter this year.
- “Adding Celero immediately accelerates our transformation and shifts our revenue mix decisively towards our growing Payments and Data segments,” Deluxe CEO Barry McCarthy said in the press release.
Dive Insight:
Celero Commerce, based in Nashville, Tennessee, targets small and mid-sized businesses with “a comprehensive, all-in-one suite of omnichannel payment solutions,” according to the release.
“By bringing together Deluxe’s scale, resources, and payments capabilities with Celero’s technology, channel expertise, and customer-first culture, we believe we're creating an even stronger platform for our customers and partners while opening new opportunities for growth,” Celero’s founder and chief executive, Kevin Jones, said in the release.
Last year, Deluxe and Celero processed about $70 billion in combined gross transactions, which would make the merged company one of the 10 largest non-bank merchant acquirers in the U.S., according to the release. Celero, which was founded in 2018, processes about $28 billion annually with 55,000 U.S. business customers, per its website.
Minneapolis-based Deluxe, which has been around more than 100 years, with roots reaching back to 1915, has been responding to decreasing check use by trying to transform the business. Deluxe has been seeking to bulk up on its payments and data marketing businesses in recent years.
Deluxe is updating its business as the world around it changes. Last year, the Trump administration mandated that the federal government transition away from paper checks as part of a payments modernization push.
Payments processing; business-to-business payments services; and the sale of marketing data have come to comprise two-thirds of Deluxe’s $2.1 billion annual revenue, McCarthy said in a July 2025 interview.
Only about 2.5% of consumer payments are still made by check in the U.S., although business and government still persist with check use.
“We’ve been very, very clear that we are taking the company’s legacy in paper payments to grow a large digital payments and data business,” McCarthy told Payments Dive.
