Marcura Buys Brightwell Navigator, Consolidating Crew Payment Sector

 

Maritime operations tech company Marcura has acquired Brightwell Navigator, the crew payroll services unit of the Atlanta-based financial services firm Brightwell. The Brightwell Navigator service is overwhelmingly popular for cruise line crew payment processing, a high-demand sector for payroll services because of the thousands of crewmembers aboard each modern cruise ship.

Navigator is particularly popular in the busy North American cruise industry, and the acquisition expands Marcura's geographic footprint. Historically, Marcura has had a market focus on Europe and Asia, where it is the leading player in merchant shipping crew payments. 

Brightwell Navigator will be integrated into Marcura's MarTrust division, and the software interfaces will be gradually merged into a single corporate portal within the MarTrust platform. Brightwell COO John Markendorf will continue on as president of the Navigator division. Taken together, the combined enterprise will handle payments for about 150,000 seafarers every month - a substantial fraction of the world total. 

After spinning off Navigator in the transaction, Brightwell will keep moving forward with its nonmaritime businesses in cross-border payments and embedded finance. The two firms will continue to cooperate on a cruise line customer reimbursement service via Brightwell's Latitude platform.
 
“We have made significant investments in rebuilding our crew account technology platform on next-generation systems," said Stuart Gregory, CEO of Marcura's MarTrust unit. "Brightwell Navigator brings the scale and specialized cruise capabilities we need to serve the entire global seafarer community with services that have a meaningful impact on crew welfare."