Global Payments Buys Sentral For Cloud-Based School Education

Global Payments Inc. (NYSE:GPN) has announced the completion of the buyout of Sentral Education in Australia, which would help it boost its educational capabilities.

Sentral Education is a cloud-based school management platform that streamlines school administration and also works with student and data management. This transaction expedites Global Payments’ product enhancement and development work for schools with the help of Sentral’s school management platform.

It should be noted that this acquisition aligns with the acquirer’s strategy to provide leading software and enrich user experience in technology solutions and payments.

Software integration is extremely important to Global Payments’ business and this deal is perfect for the same. Notably, Sentral will gain from the Global Payments’ knowledge in payments and school management solutions.

This transaction is accretive to Global Payment’s expansion strategy. The company has been emphasizing acquisitions for expedited growth. Some accretive takeovers made in recent years have added to the company’s scale and size.

One of the most notable among these is the purchase of Heartland Payments Systems (completed in 2016). Other integrations such as Pay and Shop Limited, Ezidebit, PayPros, eWay, the communities and sports divisions of ACTIVE Network have added to the company’s overall business. Recently, the company acquired AdvancedMD, a medical software firm, which will accelerate its business mix toward technology enablement. We believe, the company’s active acquisition strategy will help it achieve long-term growth.

Shares of this Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) company have rallied 27.5% year to date, outperforming the industry’s growth of 16.8%.

Other Stocks to Consider

Investors interested in the finance sector can also look into some other top-ranked stocks like Virtu Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:VIRT) , Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (NYSE:FIS) and Euronet Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:EEFT) .

Virtu Financial provides market making and liquidity services to the financial markets around the globe. The company sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and came up with average trailing four-quarter positive surprise of 0.63%. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Fidelity National Information works as a financial services technology company worldwide. It has a Zacks Rank of 2. The company managed to deliver positive results in all the trailing four reported quarters, the average being 2.72%.

Euronet provides payment and transaction processing and distribution solutions worldwide. It carries a Zacks Rank of 2. The stock pulled off average four-quarter beat of 2.68%.

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