Datacard Group Announces Agreement to Acquire Entrust Inc. to Strengthen Trusted Identities and Transaction Security

Datacard Group, the industry’s best-selling brand of secure identification and card personalization solutions, has entered into an agreement to acquire Entrust, Inc., a leader in securing digital identities and information and a Thoma Bravo LLC portfolio company. The acquisition builds on the strengths of each company to enable its customers and partners to deliver better services in highly connected environments. The acquisition is expected to close on December 31, 2013, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions.

“Today, we are pleased to announce the proposed combination of two market pioneers with one ambitious goal – helping our customers and partners reduce complexity while strengthening trust,” said Todd Wilkinson, president and CEO of Datacard Group. “Connectivity is redefining physical and digital boundaries. For our customers and partners, this means opportunity, but also significant complexity. For years the paths of our companies have intertwined as we served customers - often the same financial and government customers - from different points within the technology spectrum.  Those paths now converge to bring powerful new innovations in secure identity to enable trust while reducing complexity in deployment, management, and use.”

The acquisition will reinforce the company’s commitment and relationships with customers and partners by:

• Providing a robust platform for integrated offerings designed to serve the payments and identity ecosystems
• Reinforcing the strategy of providing flexible solutions that enable customers to choose deployment and management models
• Leveraging complementary competencies to serve market applications including: ecommerce and financial transactions, secure communications (web, social, messaging), critical infrastructure, access control, and citizen identification and services
• Utilizing Datacard Group’s global presence and resources along with Entrust’s best-in-class services to bring localized support closer to partners and customers

“Entrust is firmly established as a leader in identity-based security. We take this position very seriously, and because of that it was important that we find the right partner,” said Bill Conner, president and CEO of Entrust. “As a result of our deliberate shift to a SaaS-based business model, a significant portion of Entrust’s revenue is recurring, positioning it well for growth.  I’m confident both Entrust and Datacard customers will realize value from our companies’ combined expertise.  Simply put – this is a win-win scenario.”

The combined entity will employ nearly 2,000 professionals, leveraging hundreds of channel partners to serve tens of thousands of customers. Together the company will enable its customers to issue over 10 million physical identities daily, handle over 200 billion transactions a year, and manage billions of identities, including the majority of payment cards and identification solutions in more than 100 countries.

Importantly, the company will accelerate investments in personalization, identity and credentialing solutions.  These include Secure Issuance Anywhere™ technologies from centrally managed bureaus to instant issuance and mobile environments; authentication and credential management offerings that support a wide array of form factors, such as payment cards and identity documents, certificates, mobile, and tokens; and delivery models ranging from on-premise to cloud.  These innovations will further enhance support of third party payment, identification, benefit, proofing and device management systems to streamline connectivity into today’s more integrated environments.

Chertoff Capital, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Chertoff Group, and Centerview Partners acted as financial advisors to Entrust.

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