EVO Payments on Jan. 7 informed the state that it plans to layoff 139 employees, which is essentially its entire Portland office.

The news, first reported on Tuesday by the Portland Press Herald, is not a total surprise. A source familiar with the situation told Maine Startups Insider that EVO has been consolidating operations at its Dallas office over the course of the last few years and that this is the final phase of that. MSI’s source, who I promised to keep anonymous as they were not authorized to speak on the record, said EVO is likely to make the layoffs throughout 2020 and currently is considering leaving only a small datacenter and around 10 employees in Portland. The source said the company offered severance packages to the entire staff.

Layoffs are not a pleasant experience for anyone and the impact can be stressful for those affected. But from a big-picture perspective, this kind of watershed moment could have positive consequences for Portland’s local fintech cluster. Not only do the other fintech and payment companies (Municipay, Guideline, DAVO Technologies, ZipLine, Bottomline Technologies, BlueTarp, etc.) now have a much larger pool of available talent to draw from, but it could also lead to former EVO employees starting their own ventures.

In fact, we could look at this as part of an ongoing cycle. EVO’s presence in Portland is the result of at least three acquisitions of local payment technology companies it made over the last several years: PowerPay, Vision Payment Solutions, and Nationwide Payment Solutions. The founders of all three of those companies originally worked in Portland for First Merchants Bancard Services, which was acquired in 2002 by an out-of-state company that closed the Portland office. That closure precipitated the founders’ creation of those three payments startups, necessity being the mother of all invention. Now we have EVO, another out-of-state company, closing the local office and presenting some employees the opportunity to take that entrepreneurial leap they may have been pondering.

Could we see a new crop of payment technology companies emerge over the next year or so? Let’s hope so.

Additionally, if anyone has any ideas for how to facilitate connections between affected employees and the local startup community, please let me know.