BOSTON and PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 13, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Flywire, a high-growth vertical payments company, today announced that it has acquired Simplee, a leading healthcare technology platform, to optimize the digital payments and patient engagement experience in healthcare and scale its global payments services. The acquisition builds on Flywire’s growing healthcare payments business and accelerates the company’s market share. Flywire is also announcing a $120 million Series E investment round, led by Goldman Sachs, which contributes to Flywire’s strong balance sheet and provides additional capital to support the company’s vision to digitize payments across its key verticals, including education, healthcare and travel.

Bolstered by new digital capabilities, global payments revenue is expected to grow at a 5.9% CAGR from 2019-2028 to become a $2.5 trillion industry by 2028, according to Boston Consulting Group. However, the payments experience across many industries, like healthcare, is fraught with inefficiencies and poorly integrated point solutions, which accelerate financial losses. Exacerbating high healthcare costs is the secular trend towards high-deductible health plans; according to CMS, healthcare patients in the United States will be responsible for $365.5 BN in out-of-pocket healthcare spend per year, representing a market opportunity for Flywire that is about 70% of the size of the entire U.S. e-commerce spend.

Flywire’s acquisition of Simplee accelerates the digitization of payments to address the challenges around patient engagement as well as healthcare finance and affordability. Combining Flywire’s high-tech platform for providers with Simplee’s consumer-first paths to payment, both patients and providers are empowered to settle payment faster and on their own terms. Together, the companies will power four of the top ten US healthcare systems and process more than $10 billion in patient payments per year.

“Flywire is uniquely built on a global payments network, which is the cornerstone of how we move billions of dollars across 200+ countries and 150 currencies, and an industry-leading payments platform,” said Mike Massaro, CEO of Flywire. “This digital foundation enables us to develop vertical-specific applications that make payments more efficient and cost-effective for our global clients. The Simplee acquisition improves patient engagement and healthcare affordability and extends these capabilities to a broader customer base.”

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