Capital One is buying startup Brex for $5.15 billion in credit card firm’s latest deal

Capital One said Thursday that it was acquiring startup Brex for $5.15 billion, the latest splashy deal undertaken by CEO Richard Fairbank.

The firm, which disclosed the deal in its fourth-quarter earnings statement, said it would pay 50% cash and 50% stock for Brex.

Shares of the bank fell about 4%.

Under Fairbank, a rare founder-CEO of a major U.S. bank, Capital One acquired rival card firm Discover Financial last year for about $35 billion. That deal was Fairbank’s crowning achievement, giving the credit card lender access to one of the only payment networks of any scale.

“Since our founding, we set out to build a payments company at the frontier of the technology revolution,” Fairbank said in a release. “Acquiring Brex accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments marketplace.”

Fairbank said that Brex pioneered the combination of corporate cards, banking and spend management software: “They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top,” he said.

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