After being purchased almost two years ago, Mercury is dropping its name and rebranding itself Vantiv Integrated Payments, which incorporates the name of its parent company, Vantiv.
The announcement, made public Thursday, completes a 1½-year effort to organize under a singular brand, said Matt Taylor, group president of integrated payments emerging channels at Vantiv and former CEO of Mercury.
“Yes, there’s some nostalgia to the name (Mercury), but it’s confusing to do your work under multiple brand names,” Taylor said.
Vantiv Integrated Payments is now made up of Mercury and Element Payment Services, another payment processing company that Vantiv acquired in 2013.
The name change was paired with a positive fourth-quarter and full-year 2015 earnings report, which showed fourth-quarter net revenue increased 13 percent to $453 million as compared with $402 million the previous year.
“In the fourth quarter, we beat consensus in terms of revenues and earnings,” Taylor said.
Vantiv is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol VNTV. Its stock closed at $48.11 Wednesday, a 4.86 percent gain. The company processed 23 billion transactions worth $842 billion at 700,000 merchant locations in 2015, including restaurants, grocery stores and drug stores.
Mercury, a payment-processing company founded 15 years ago in Durango, was purchased by the Cincinnati-based Vantiv for $1.65 billion in June 2014. The company enables payment by credit cards, debit cards, mobile devices and online for businesses of all sizes, including small- and medium-size businesses in Durango, such as Durango Joe’s and Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. It processes more PIN debit transactions than anyone else, and is No. 2 for credit card transactions in the U.S.
Vantiv remains one of Durango’s largest employers, with about 400 employees in Durango and 4,000 across the country. The company has no plans to relocate any of its 400 employees based in Durango; in fact, it has 78 job openings in Durango, including about 55 in customer care, and about 40 more openings are expected in the next couple of months, Taylor said.
About the same time it was bought, Mercury moved into a new 80,000-square-foot building south of the Durango Mall. Mercury Village, as it is called, has room for 566 employees.
Taylor said Vantiv is committed to the Durango area. While it is remote and sometimes difficult to access, Durango has a vibrant community and loyal employee base. The Durango office also adds diversity to Vantiv’s workforce, he said.
“You see more tenure in Durango than you do in almost all the other geographies,” he said. “... You get people here who leave on their lunch hour and go kayaking. You look across the parking lot on a lot of summer days and there are mountain bikes.”
For some residents, a name change may signify the moving on of a successful local business that created above-average-paying jobs and gave back to the community through charity and volunteerism. But Taylor said Vantiv’s acquisition was needed to help both companies continue to prosper.
“We’ve been through all of the rigors of integrating the businesses together,” Taylor said. “This is really just a new name change.”
Taylor used words like “long-term home” and “long-term fixture” in describing Vantiv’s commitment to Durango. Some employees based at Vantiv’s headquarters in Cincinnati have moved here, and others are trying to move here, he said.
“We did an incredibly successful thing in terms of building our company up and being able to sell it the way we sold it,” he said. “If you’re an employee and were a part of something that successful, it feels great, and it feels great to do it here.”
Inside the company, Vantiv isn’t viewed as a negative force, he said. The acquisition means employees are working for a company with more influence and resources. Employees have been working for Vantiv since 2014, so the name change doesn’t carry much significance.
“Reception of the name change was surprisingly welcome,” Taylor said. “We don’t have anymore integration work or organizing to do. This is more organizing under one message, one brand.”
If anything, Vantiv is learning from Durango’s culture, including adopting Mercury Gives, a popular philanthropic program, and incorporating it company-wide. The program will be renamed Vantiv Gives.
Mercury started the Mercury Gives program five years ago and has worked with more than 250 local charities. The program gives employees time to volunteer and matches their philanthropic donations. For the next two months, the company will triple match up to $500 for Durango employees. In other words, if a Vantiv employee in Durango donates $500, the charity will receive $2,000.
shane@durangoherald.com