acquirediyzico

iyzico lets any Turkish shop take cards online in an afternoon

Plug-and-play card payments for marketplaces and SMEs — virtual POS, payment links, and buyer protection with no bank integration project.

بوابة دفع إلكتروني تمكّن المتاجر والمنصات التركية الصغيرة من قبول البطاقات عبر الإنترنت بسهولة وأمان.

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  1. The Bottleneck

    What was broken?

    Small Turkish merchants and marketplaces couldn't accept online card payments: bank virtual-POS onboarding was slow, technical, and built for large corporates.

  2. The Move

    Why it worked

    A Stripe-like developer-friendly checkout with fraud screening and buyer protection onboarded hundreds of marketplaces and hundreds of thousands of sellers, making iyzico PayU's $165M gateway to Turkey.

  3. The Trap

    Battle scars

    Competing with banks' own POS rails and global gateways on price; fraud and chargeback risk across long-tail sellers; integrating the $87M Paynet deal into one B2C+B2B platform.

The problem

In the early 2010s a Turkish SME that wanted to sell online faced the bank virtual-POS gauntlet: weeks of paperwork, technical integration, and collateral demands — while marketplaces had no clean way to split a card payment across hundreds of sellers.

How it works

iyzico offers a single integration — embedded checkout, payment links, subscription billing — that accepts cards on a merchant’s behalf with fraud screening and 3D Secure built in. Marketplace orders are automatically split between sellers, shoppers get buyer-protection guarantees and instalment options, and newer physical-POS and dealer-network products carry the same rails into offline retail. Since 2025 the Paynet acquisition adds B2B and B2B2C collection strength.

Pain points

Bank onboarding measured in weeks, marketplace finance teams reconciling seller payouts in spreadsheets, and checkout abandonment from shoppers who don’t trust unknown stores.

Business model

A percentage take on every transaction processed, plus paid products around payout splitting, subscriptions, mass payouts, in-store POS, and — via Paynet — enterprise B2B collections.

Challenges

Banks defend their acquiring margins, global gateways chase the same enterprise logos, and every long-tail seller added raises fraud and chargeback exposure. The Paynet integration must fuse a B2C checkout company with a B2B collections house without breaking either.

Funding

  • Raised/acquired: $165M acquisition by PayU (Naspers) in June 2019 — one of Turkey’s largest startup exits at the time; iyzico now sits inside the Prosus group.
  • Paynet deal: $87M acquisition from Arena Group, agreed May 2024 and completed 13 February 2025 after Competition Authority and CBRT approvals.
  • Valuation: MISSING.

Latest — February 2025

On 13–14 February 2025 iyzico completed its $87 million acquisition of Paynet, one of the largest tech deals between two Turkish firms, adding B2B/B2B2C payments and collections to its consumer checkout base of 130,000+ e-commerce merchants.

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