We have achieved some significant exits in the past five years. They remain part of theArmada.
Why we invested in wiGroup
When Bevan and Basie approached us with their idea for a mobile wallet that paired with a retail point of sale terminal to effect a cardless mobile transaction at point of sale before the launch of smart phones, we felt they were onto something that could become pervasive as the adoption of mobile phones grew but acknowledged that there was still quite a bit of risk given the complexity of integrating their platform to point of sale terminals, the banks position on card ‘not present’ transactions and the challenges of developing solutions compatible for all feature phones but we (the UCS group at the time) were excited about the prospect of backing something at the cutting edge of the interface between payments and mobile technologies. We also felt that we could derisk the time to market by fast tracking the integration to retail point of sale terminals given that we were already invested in various point of sale software businesses which gave us, and could give wiGroup, access to approximately 85% of the South African retail base over time. This coupled with the prospect of newer generation ‘smart phones’ replacing feature phones with all the benefits that that would bring as well as our relationship with the incumbent banks given our investment in payments businesses led us to justify our early investment, which after a couple of pivots and a few challenging times in those early days proved to be an amazing journey and the business continues to grow from strength to strength year on year.
01
wiGroup (yoyo)
As one of the first investors in wiGroup, we exited as a shareholder after a 12-year partnership.
wiGroup is well-placed to aggressively internationalise the business following the conclusion of the deal with Yoyo.
wiGroup was the first business that we invested in and has proven to be one of South Africa’s great entrepreneurial tech success stories. We wish Bevan and the team well as they continue to grow their presence locally and globally over the coming years.
02
Retail Capital
Since its inception in 2011, Retail Capital has developed a robust risk decisioning process for small business funding products, launched a successful set of fintech partnerships, and developed the underlying technology for embedded funding solutions.
Tymebank fully acquired Retail Capital in a deal worth R1.5 billion.
Why we invested in Retail Capital
We founded Crossfin around an investment thesis that focussed on investing behind businesses that gave us access to the rails (payment rails) first then to invest in businesses which leveraged those rails to distribute scalable fintech products and services. Retail Capital was a Fintech business that could leverage the payment rails in the Crossfin portfolio to scale it’s merchant cash advance (VAS) offering and so was a natural target for Crossfin to acquire and which leveraged the iKhokha and Adumo rails very successfully for the benefit of all stakeholders.
Why we invested in Adumo
We founded Crossfin around an investment thesis that focussed on investing behind businesses that gave us access to the rails (payment rails) first then to invest in businesses which leveraged those rails to distribute scalable fintech products and services and the businesses in Adumo gave us access to those payment rails.
03
adumo
Our journey with some of the businesses in the Adumo group of companies extends as far back as 2009 when still as the UCS Group, we consolidated our payments and loyalty assets, including the Destiny payments business, into Innervation Value Added Services (Pty) Ltd. We continued to invest into relevant assets to support our thesis of wanting to own the largest independent omni channel acquiring business in SA that supported merchants across tiers 2 to 4 of the South African retail market. Following the acquisition of Sureswipe in 2019, the leading independent ISO acquirer of SME’s at the time, we consolidated all relevant payment acquiring assets under a new structure, the Adumo Group headed up by Paul Kent and subsequently also acquired SA’s largest independent ISV in the hospitality market, GAAP.
Adumo has grown from strength to strength and is well positioned to scale significantly into the future post the acquisition by Lesaka given the great strategic fit and opportunity to complement Lesaka’s compelling merchant value proposition across issuing, acquiring and VAS in Sub Saharan Africa.
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