Verifone Systems Inc announced the acquisition of Point, a leading provider of payment and gateway services for retailers. Point operates in 11 European countries and serves nearly 500,000 merchant contracts. Point, based in Sweden, provides a range of payment processing and other services, including gateway services, card encryption and ecommerce processing.

"This acquisition supports our vision of offering retailers everywhere a managed service to easily accept all existing payment types, including the evolving alternative and mobile payment methods being offered by traditional card brands and new entrants such as Google, PayPal, Groupon and Isis," said VeriFone CEO Douglas G. Bergeron. "The new entrants can take advantage of easy and accelerated access to VeriFone's worldwide installation of more than 20 million merchant lanes."

Point will operate as a VeriFone company. VeriFone intends to extend the Point platform throughout the region and beyond, with the aim of creating the world's largest infrastructure for rapid deployment of alternative payments and NFC mobile commerce.

VeriFone Holdings, Inc. is a provider of secure electronic payment solutions. The company offers expertise, solutions and services that add value to the point of sale with merchant-operated, consumer-facing and self-service payment systems for the financial, retail, hospitality, petroleum, government and healthcare vertical markets.