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