Marketing company, Red Ventures, LLC has just closed on the acquisition of consumer financial services company, Bankrate (owner of Bankrate.com and other companies such as CreditCards.com, Caring.com, Interest.com, Bankaholic.com, Mortgage-calc.com, CreditCardGuide.com, ThePointsGuy.com, CD.com, and Quizzle) for roughly $1.4 billion in cash ($14.00 per share).
Red Ventures, LLC is a private company based in North Carolina that refers to themselves as a “leading digital consumer choice platform,” so their focus is online customer acquisition (lead generation).
The company has been on an acquisition spree, closing on Allconnect, Choose Energy, and Soda.com in the last year alone after investing $4M in CourseHorse just prior to that.
Sources tell The American Genius that Red Ventures’ first move today was layoffs.
We’ve reached out to Red Ventures and Bankrate’s brands for comment, so far confirming that CreditCards.com staff in Austin were surprised this morning with 34 to 37 pink slips, wiping out the executive team, some developers, and most of the social media team.
With this new acquisition, Red Ventures now has nearly 4,000 employees (375+ from Bankrate), and their slick recruiting videos shows happy team members jumping out of planes, bowling, and working with smiles.
When the acquisition was originally announced in July, Bankrate CEO and President, Kenneth Esterow said, “We are thrilled to have reached an agreement that delivers immediate and significant value to our shareholders while joining with Red Ventures, a world-class organization that will take the Bankrate businesses to the next level of success. As a part of Red Ventures, Bankrate will be better positioned than ever to be the partner of choice for providers to acquire customers.”
Ric Elias, CEO of Red Ventures said in July, “Our capabilities are highly complementary. We see significant potential to leverage our technology, strategic partnerships and digital expertise and build on Bankrate’s leading platforms to help more consumers find the financial services and products that meet their needs.”
Some will criticize the blindside, others will call reorganization par for the course for an online marketing course flexing its muscles in the financial services vertical they’ve been focused on for years.
Update: Bankrate’s VP of Corporate Communications says they can confirm the acquisition but the company has no further comment.
Kiri Isaac is the Web Producer and a Staff Writer at The American Genius and studied communications at Texas A&M. She is fluent in sarcasm and movie quotes and her love language is tacos.
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