NEW YORK (Reuters Breakingviews) - Blackstone isn’t known for leaving money on the table. But in merging Paysafe, a payments company it co-owns with fellow buyout group CVC, with a listed cash shell, Steve Schwarzman’s firm has shown there’s a price for convenience. In this case, it’s around $1.2 billion. Three years after they bought the digital payments firm, Blackstone and CVC are cutting their stake in Paysafe by just over half and merging it with a special-purpose acquisition company backed by financial mogul Bill Foley. Factoring in a 20% increase in the value of the SPAC’s shares on Monday, Blackstone and CVC will take out $2.3 billion of cash and hold on to just under $4 billion of stock, worth a total of $6.3 billion. On paper, that means the buyout firms are taking a haircut. Based on the SPAC’s share price on Monday after the deal was announced, investors think Paysafe’s enterprise value is around $10.4 billion. Deduct the $2.9 billion of net debt it has today – in other words, before doing the SPAC deal – and the theoretical value of the private owners’ stock is more like $7.5 billion. It’s as if they’ve given up $1.2 billion, a little more than 15% of their value, to list the shares, extract cash and bring payments expert Foley on board. While that sounds like a lot, it’s pretty attractive for a buyout firm like Blackstone. In a traditional initial public offering, shareholders would expect the owners to sell shares cheaply enough that the stock can rise on the first day. There would be fees to pay to bankers, perhaps $250 million on a deal of this size. Most importantly, it would be hard to raise a substantial amount of new money and sell lots of shares without sending a negative signal to new buyers, which might punish the valuation. There are likely to be more where this came from. Paysafe is not Blackstone’s first sale of a company through a SPAC. And many private equity owners have one eye on speedy exits, since U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to increase the taxes they pay on investment gains. The convenience afforded by SPACs comes at a price, but it’s one buyout firms will be happy enough to pay.