Capital One is buying startup Brex for $5.15 billion in the credit card company’s latest deal

Capital One It said Thursday it has acquired payments startup Brex for $5.15 billion, the latest blockbuster deal by CEO Richard Fairbank.

The company, which revealed the deal in its fourth-quarter earnings statement, said it would pay 50% cash and 50% stock for Brix.

The bank’s shares fell by about 3%.

Under Fairbank, the rare founder and CEO of a major U.S. bank, Capital One acquired rival card company Discover Financial last year for about $35 billion. The deal was Fairbank’s biggest milestone, giving the credit card lender access to one of the only payment networks of any scale.

“Since our founding, we have set out to build a payments company on the frontiers of the technology revolution,” Fairbank said in a statement. “The acquisition of BRICS accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments market.”

BRICS pioneered the combination of corporate cards, banking and spend management software: “They have taken the rarest journeys in fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the technology stack to the top,” Fairbank said.

Capital One, which has provided business cards for decades, has become increasingly convinced that the BRICS model will be the winning bid, according to a person familiar with the lender’s strategy.

“We didn’t have to pursue this acquisition, our growth has been incredibly strong,” Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi told CNBC in an interview.

Combining their technology with Capital One’s reach and resources would accelerate its scale faster than as a stand-alone company, he said.