Column: Citigroup scoops up Bala Cynwyd firm

As big as it is,

Citigroup Inc.

probably does a lot of deals all over the world that barely make a ripple outside of the trade press.

Last month, it bought a small company that has the kind of Philadelphia story we don't hear enough of.

Citigroup acquired a Bala Cynwyd company called PayQuik, which has developed a money-transfer system that banks and other financial-services firms use to allow customers to transfer money internationally.

PayQuik is focused on remittances, the payments by migrants to families back home - Latin America, India, China, wherever home is. Migrants' options typically are to send the money with someone traveling to their hometown, use a money-transfer service such as Western Union or MoneyGram, or go to a bank.

In 2006, 150 million migrants worldwide sent more than $300 billion to their families in developing countries, according to research commissioned by the International Fund for Agricultural Development. One analyst projects that figure could grow to $500 billion by 2010.

Migrants include those working in the fields, driving a cab, writing software code, running lab tests on a promising pharmaceutical compound, or even starting a company like PayQuik.

Bhairav Trivedi, who is now global head of remittance services at Citigroup, came to the United States from India 17 years ago. After graduating from Stanford, he worked in credit cards and financial services before coming to Philadelphia to get his M.B.A. at Wharton.

Post-M.B.A., he got a job at McKinsey & Co., of New York, but returned to Philadelphia to start PayQuik with another Wharton graduate using investment from family and friends.

Like other tech start-ups, PayQuik soon tapped the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania for its first institutional capital. Investments by Murex Investments and MentorTech Ventures, two Philadelphia early-stage venture firms, followed to help it grow.

Then last year, along came one of the world's biggest banks to buy PayQuik. Citigroup said it had been offering global remittance services since 2006. In PayQuik, it saw a technology platform that would allow customers to reach more than 90 countries using what Citigroup is now calling its QuikRemit service.

For Trivedi, who was there at the start, the deal is exciting. "This product will be an industry standard," he said.

PayQuik is the second Philadelphia-area tech company focused on electronic finance that Citigroup has acquired in the last year. It bought Ecount Inc., of Conshohocken, last March. (Terms of both deals were not disclosed.)

Often one company will buy another just for the products, and the employees lose their jobs. Citigroup didn't do that with Ecount, and it's not with PayQuik. PayQuik and its 60 employees are expected to move to Conshohocken, where Ecount has about 100 employees, later this year.

No contraction

In a report that won't send anyone dancing into the streets, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia released a survey of professional forecasters that sees "weak growth" for the first half of 2008.

The 50 forecasters surveyed see economic growth of 0.7 percent, rather than the 2.2 percent they projected three months ago, the Fed said.

Hooray for no recession, but weak growth won't get anyone excited.

The pros are looking for real gross domestic product to grow 1.8 percent in 2008 and 2.9 percent in 2009. And they peg the likelihood of a downturn this quarter at 47 percent, up from 23 percent three months ago.

The Fed also asked economists when they thought the effects of the $152 billion economic-stimulus plan might be felt. Thirteen of them said they thought we'd start to feel it in the second quarter, while 19 thought it wouldn't start until the third quarter.

Quotable

   "I'm having more fun now . . . than I've had in 10 years."

- Vernon W. Hill II,

the ex-Commerce Bancorp Inc. CEO on his various business interests, including his recent investment in the Saladworks restaurant chain.