Advent, Bain Said to Plan $2 Billion of LBO Loans to Bid for RBS Card Unit
Advent International Corp. and Bain Capital LLC are seeking 1.35 billion pounds ($2.1 billion) of loans to fund their bid to buy Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s credit-card payment processing unit, two people familiar with the matter said.
Lenders led by RBS, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and UBS AG are arranging the financing, which includes about 400 million pounds of mezzanine debt, said the people, who declined to be identified because the information is private.
Spokesmen for Advent and Bain declined to comment.
The deal would add to $5.3 billion of buyout financing underwritten in Europe this year, 53 percent more than during the same period last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. RBS, taken over by the U.K. government in 2008 after credit losses forced it to seek a bailout, is the most active underwriter of all types of leveraged loans in Europe.
Advent and Bain, both based in Boston, entered exclusive talks with RBS to buy WorldPay, people with knowledge of the matter said on July 23. An agreement may be announced by Aug. 6.
Private-equity firms pay for takeovers by loading a target company with debt and using its cash flow to repay lenders. The borrowings are considered leveraged, or below BBB- by Standard & Poor’s and Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service.
WorldPay operates in more than 40 countries and provides credit-card payment processing services to clients including small- and medium-sized businesses. It’s among the 10 largest processors of online payments in the U.S., according to RBS’s website.
To contact the reporter on this story: Patricia Kuo in London at pkuo2@bloomberg.net
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