C H Robinson to sell payment processing unit T-Chek to Electronic Funds Source for $302.5 mn

C H Robinson Worldwide, one of the world's largest third-party logistics providers, today agreed to sell its payment processing business unit, T-Chek, to privately held Electronic Funds Source (EFS), for $302.5 million, a move designed to raise money to fund its acquisition of freight forwarder Phoenix International.

Minnesota-based T-Chek is a business-to-business provider of spend management and payment processing services for the transportation industry. T-Chek's technology supports a variety of funds transfer, vendor payment, fuel purchasing, and online expense management tools.

Prior to the sale, C H Robinson purchased services from T-Chek, including advance funds to C H Robinson's contract carriers, and employee expense card services. C H Robinson said that it has entered into a contract to purchase those services from EFS.

T-Chek has annual revenue of $49.3 million, and operating income of $24.6 million.

''We are extremely excited about the synergies and strategic benefits of combining these two highly complementary cultures'', said Scott Phillips, president and chief executive officer of EFS. ''T-Chek brings exciting new markets and products to EFS in addition to seasoned human capital with strong industry experience.''

''As the payment services industry continues to consolidate and evolve, scale and alignment with the financial services sector are becoming increasingly important. EFS is an excellent organisation and we felt, for T-Chek's long term success, that strategically it was the right time for T-Chek to join forces with EFS,''  said John Wiehoff, chief executive officer of C H Robinson.