Cal Buys Grow: Inside Israel's 200 Million Shekel Fintech Deal
Cal — Israel Credit Cards — is acquiring Grow Payments Ltd. for roughly 200 million shekels. The first major move by new Cal CEO Yafit Griani and the first exit of a nonbank Israeli payments company since the Bank of Israel opened the domestic rails in August 2024.
Published in Fintech & Public Markets — olam.business
Cal — Israel Credit Cards — is acquiring Grow Payments Ltd. for roughly 200 million shekels. It is the first major move by Cal's new CEO Yafit Griani, and the fastest exit for a nonbank Israeli payments company since the Bank of Israel opened the country's core payment rails to nonbank participants in August 2024.
The Deal
Per Globes, Cal is in advanced negotiations to acquire Grow Payments Ltd. for approximately 200 million shekels. The transaction, first reported on June 29, 2026, would move Grow's roughly 100,000 Israeli small and mid-sized business customers — plus its direct-access license to the Bank of Israel's ZAHAV, MASAV, and SHVA rails — onto the balance sheet of one of Israel's three dominant credit card networks.
It is Yafit Griani's first announced acquisition since taking over as Cal's chief executive. It is also the clearest signal to date that Israel's incumbent card networks intend to buy their way into the nonbank payments layer rather than build against it.
Who Grow Is
Grow Payments Ltd. — originally Meshulam, later renamed Grow — positioned itself as Israel's first nonbank for small businesses. It offers a business checking account substitute, card acceptance, invoicing, and outbound payments to a customer base of Israeli merchants that historically had no alternative to a traditional bank relationship.
Grow's commercial product is a payment-acceptance layer that sits inside the invoicing software an Israeli small business already uses. A merchant on Greeninvoice, Sumit, or EZcount issues an invoice. The invoice includes a Grow payment link. The customer pays — by credit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Bit. The receipt issues automatically. The money settles to the merchant's bank account. The user experience is comparable to Cardcom or Tranzila. The difference sits underneath: Grow clears directly on Bank of Israel infrastructure, so the intermediary stack is shorter than what any bank-owned acquirer offers.
The company was one of three nonbank entities — alongside Global Remit and Ofek Credit Union — that the Bank of Israel authorized in August 2024 to operate directly on the country's supervised payment systems. That authorization is what makes Grow a strategic asset. Without it, Grow is a software layer on top of a bank. With it, Grow is a payments institution on the same rails as the banks themselves.
Why Cal Wants Them
Cal already issues credit cards. It does not, until now, hold direct access to ZAHAV or MASAV as a nonbank participant. Buying Grow gives Cal three things simultaneously: a rail-level connection to the core Israeli payment infrastructure, 100,000 SMB relationships that skew younger and more digital than Cal's legacy cardholder base, and a nonbank subsidiary that can offer deposit-adjacent products without triggering the regulatory weight of a full bank license.
The 200 million shekel price — roughly 55 million dollars — is small relative to Cal's balance sheet. It is large relative to the size of the Israeli nonbank fintech category, which until August 2024 did not exist as an operating category at all.
Cal's competitors — Isracard and Max — retain physical retail, deep merchant relationships, and the terminals that sit on Israeli countertops. What none of them owned until now was direct infrastructure access. Cal moves first.
The Structural Backdrop
Israel spent a decade opening its payment systems to nonbank participants. The Regulation of Payment Services and Payment Initiation Law took effect in 2023. The Bank of Israel published its Payment Systems Access Guide the same year. In August 2024, the first three nonbank entities — Grow among them — completed the technical connection process.
In January 2026, the Bank of Israel announced it would expand the participant identification code from two digits to three, removing the technical ceiling on the number of nonbank participants the system can support. That change is scheduled to roll out during 2026 and 2027. In April 2026, three more entities — Gama, Max-IT, and Rapyd Israel — completed accession. The regulatory direction is set. The commercial direction — consolidation into the incumbents — is now beginning.
What Comes Next
Grow is the first nonbank Israeli payments company to be acquired by a domestic incumbent. It is unlikely to be the last. Global Remit, Gama, Max-IT, and the international entrants — Revolut, Rapyd, Airwallex, Mesh Payments — now sit inside a market where the incumbent bid has been publicly established at roughly 2,000 shekels per SMB customer. That number will move. The question is which direction, and who moves next.
For Cal, the immediate next steps are regulatory approval from the Capital Markets, Insurance and Savings Authority and integration planning for Grow's rail-level connections. For the Israeli fintech category, the immediate signal is that direct rail access is now a priced, transferable asset — and that the window for building against the banks may be shorter than founders assumed.
The structural significance is broader than any single company. For two decades the Israeli SMB payments stack was a closed system: bank-owned infrastructure, bank-written rules, bank-set pricing, merchant as price-taker. August 2024 broke that. Grow was the first proof-point that a nonbank fintech could operate inside the system on the same terms as the banks. Twenty-two months later, one of those banks' closest counterparts bought it.
— The Olam Editorial Team
