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Louis Hoch and Houston Frost. Payment Data Systems just bought Frost’s company, Akimbo Financial.

Payment Data Systems, an online payments company, announced Tuesday it has acquired Akimbo Financial for $3 million.

Payment Data Systems is buying the company with common stock in two tranches with up to $300,000 in cash if any liabilities are assumed.

Akimbo, founded in 2010, has raised $850,000 in investment. The company, based at Geekdom, a co-working and accelerator for tech companies based in downtown San Antonio, is one of the first major acquisitions of a Geekdom company.

Payment Data Systems operates FiCentive, a credit card processing platform, and Akimbo sells and markets pre-paid credit cards. The companies are a great fit, said Louis Hoch, president and CEO of FiCentive.

“The Akimbo team has developed a highly innovative cardholder service platform to deliver innovative features and functionality that we believe are necessary to gain market share in the general purpose reloadable prepaid card industry segment,” Hoch said in a news statement. “Not only will FiCentive have access to new and significant prepaid card front-end technology including mobile applications, but will also be acquiring significant human capital with deep prepaid card industry knowledge.”

The Akimbo card program will be transitioned to FiCentive’s back-end prepaid card processing platform over the next few months and future general purpose card programs will be delivered utilizing the Akimbo platform on top of the FiCentive prepaid card processing engine, Hoch said.

Houston Frost, CEO and founder of Akimbo will join FiCentive along with his four employees. FiCentive has 11 employees.

“We believe joining the Payment Data Systems family will help further our goal of reinventing the prepaid card,” Frost said in a news statement. “Integrating with FiCentive’s prepaid card platform will enable new features and functionality, a higher level of customer service and ensure our ability to keep costs low for thousands of Akimbo members.”

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

What is the fastest way to share money with friends and family? Always carry cash? Use pre-paid cards? With an Akimbo Card account, users can share money with any other Akimbo card holder instantly by using either a mobile app or the Akimbo Website via the internet. Akimbo accounts have both primary users and sub users, making it possible for parents to give “allowance cards” to their kids or employers to transfer funds quickly to secondary employee cards.
Created by CEO Houston Frost, the Akimbo card is a full-fledged Visa debit card used in partnership with Bancorp Banks. Users do not, however, need to access bank services to use the cards and transfer money between cards. In fact, Akimbo can essentially replace a normal bank account for day to day needs.
The Akimbo business model relies on interchange revenue – the small fees paid by banks for card transactions – as well as other fees such as ATM charges. Signing up for an account is free and there are currently no monthly fees, though there may be fees for creating additional sub accounts. Akimbo moved from Austin to San Antonio in February, and is currently located Geekdom of San Antonio. The startup has six full time employees, and around a dozen part time employees – many of which were acquired after moving to Geekdom.
For its next step, Akimbo is in the process of adding an “instant check loading” feature to their cards that will allow users to load the check on their cards within 30 minutes. The feature is now in beta.

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