Bank of America has acquired Santa Barbara, California-based Axia Technologies, which is also known as AxiaMed. The 6-year-old payments technology company focuses on healthcare. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Why should we care?
The AxiaMed acquisition is part of broader plans from Bank of America to expand healthcare payments offerings, an area where disruptors are revamping legacy payments systems dependent on paper bills and checks. AxiaMed focuses on facilitating patient payments, filling a void where “healthcare providers had little experience with the complexities of payment card processing and were unsure of how to best mitigate security and compliance risks.” AxiaMed’s cloud-based platform integrates with electronic health records and practice management systems to support multiple payment methods. Through tokenized card-on-file technology, providers that work with AxiaMed can offer extended payment plans, among other options. Bank of America suggested the acquisition will help it advance innovation in a key industry sector. “Healthcare is super important to the bank,” Mark Monaco, head of enterprise payments at Bank of America, said in a recent interview. Other banks are entering this space too, including Ally Financial, which completed its acquisition of healthcare point-of-sale lending technology company Health Credit Services in 2019, and efforts from JPMorgan Chase and Synchrony Financial to grow their healthcare payments capabilities.