Litle & Co. Sold for $361M in Payments Processing Consolidation

Helping money change hands has always been a good business. Smooth out the bumps in e-commerce payments, and you’re on another level altogether.

That’s the driver behind today’s acquisition of Lowell, MA-based Litle & Co., a decade-old payments processing provider that counts some big names in e-commerce among its roster of clients. The company is being purchased by Cincinnati-based Vantiv (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VNTV]]) for $361 million.

Litle, founded in 2001, has seen its business grow pretty steeply as electronic payments take a bigger bite of consumer spending. It was actually ranked No. 1 overall on the Inc. 500 list of fast-growing companies back in 2006, and reported revenues of $200 million for 2009, the last figure I could find for its Inc. rankings.

Litle’s customer list is impressive in its breadth: The company touts relationships with such companies as GoDaddy.com, Overstock.com, Box, Gilt Groupe, Wayfair, and even King Arthur Flour.

Vantiv is a fairly big player in payment processing, reporting earnings of about $23 million in the second quarter on revenues of about $470 million. The firm also has ties to at least one other local payments company: Last week, Vantiv and Wellesley, MA-based Paydiant rolled out a mobile-wallet platform for merchants, financial institutions, and their customers.

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.