KeyBank has acquired fintech XUP Payments and will use the B2B digital payments platform to expand its embedded banking strategy and streamline automation, the bank announced Monday.

The $187 billion bank did not disclose financial details of the deal, which closed Nov. 19. XUP earlier this year raised $3 million over one funding round led by KeyBank and venture capital company Naples Technology Ventures, according to Crunchbase.

XUP Payments is the Cleveland-based bank’s first fintech acquisition that plays in the commercial space, Jon Briggs, head of commercial product and innovation at Key, told Bank Automation News.

“It started off helping us to transform our merchant services business,” Briggs said. “More pointedly, for what they did for us is help us build in digital origination capability for our merchant services business.”

XUP created an omni-channel experience so that merchants can sign on to merchant services, or credit card processing, without having to go into a branch, Briggs said. The solution offers support for customer onboarding, service, data analytics, sales and transactions. An XUP case study found that its technology increased lead generation by 5% through the bank’s digital channels.

Card processing has been “transformational” for the bank, growing at a rate “north of 40%” year over year, Briggs said. The acquisition is also an automation play, he added.

“It’s about taking paper out of the process and people out of the process and making it far more streamlined and digital for our clients,” Briggs told BAN.

XUP includes integrations into an ecosystem of large fintechs and credit card processing companies such as Fiserv. The plan is to build additional integrations with enterprise resource systems such as NetSuite and accounting software solutions such as QuickBooks. The bank also plans for the solution to offer application programmable interface (API) connectivity for other integrations.

“Today, an invoice may come in, be funneled for approval, go through the approval to ultimately get signed by a number of folks internally, then go back into banking for you to be able to make payments,” Briggs said. “When banking becomes embedded in the system, that becomes one seamless experience where the information and the data just flows with the payment, thus streamlining the payables or receivables experience for those employees and those clients.”

KeyBank earlier this year acquired AQN Strategies to enhance its data analytics capabilities.