Saratoga Partners, a New York-based private equity investment firm, announced it has acquired a substantial interest in NAT, Inc., a provider of software and services for administering warranty and service contracts for consumer products. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Saratoga said Peter Leger, NAT’s new chief executive officer, and founder Mark Nagelvoort, will have a significant equity stake in the company. Nagelvoort will continue to serve as president and chief technology officer.
NAT is based in Des Plaines, Illinois. Clients that use the company’s proprietary systems are providers of automotive, consumer retail, home warranty and service plans, Saratoga said. The company says its clients include three of the top 10 insurance companies, one of the top five automotive manufacturers and two major auto-glass service providers.
“With the new resources from Saratoga,” Nagelvoort said, “and the experience and expertise that Peter Leger adds to our team, NAT can now aggressively expand its business by using our systems to offer sales and claims processing for point-of-sale warranty and service plans for both domestic and international providers.”
“This is a logical progression for our company as we move into the next phase of our growth,” Nagelvoort said.
Christian Oberbeck, managing director at Saratoga, noted that the investment “fits well with our firm’s growing portfolio of investments in transaction processing and business process outsourcing companies.”
“NAT has an excellent reputation for market-leading products and services,” Oberbeck said. “It has a solid and loyal customer and employee base and an effective, knowledgeable management team. Given its current strong business momentum, the opportunity for growth is substantial.”
Before joining NAT, Leger had been the founder and CEO of the TAS group, Incorporated, a provider of business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
He also held top executive positions with APAC Customer Services, Inc., where he was president and CEO; Credit Management Solutions Inc., president and CEO, and Automatic Data Processing, Inc., where he had been president of the Dealer Services Group.
“Peter Leger’s proven experience in the marketing and deployment of integrated software systems and services in the automotive sector for point-of-sale applications will allow NAT to rapidly expand its client base,” Nagelvoort said.
Leger is a graduate of McGill University, Montreal, and has an MBA from Concordia University in Montreal with honorable distinction in international business. He also is a chartered accountant, the Canadian equivalent of a certified public accountant.
The acquisition of NAT was the second transaction announced by Saratoga Partners this year. In early January, it said it had agreed acquire Sericol, the specialty printing inks business of BP subsidiary Burmah Castrol plc in a transaction valued at $115 million in cash and assumed debt.
Saratoga Partners is a middle-market private equity investment firm with $750 million of committed and invested institutional equity capital. It invests in businesses with strong management teams and valuations of between $50 million and $500 million, specializing in companies in manufacturing, business services and media and telecommunications industries.
Since Saratoga was founded in 1984 as a division of the New York investment firm Dillon, Read & Co., Inc., it has invested in 30 companies with an aggregate value of more than $3.5 billion. It has been an independent firm since 1998 after Dillon Read was acquired by Swiss Bank Corporation (a predecessor to UBS AG).
