Local digital commerce firm Crossfin Technology Holdings has boosted its fintech portfolio after financing the acquisition of Edenred SA.
Edenred SA is a subsidiary of French-based corporate services company Edenred; and the acquisition was done through Crossfin's portfolio company, Innervation.
The Crossfin group owns stakes in several companies in the fintech industry, including Innervation, WiGroup, Emerge Mobile (including iKhokha), Alacrity and Blue Garnet. Capital Eye Investments and Durban-based investment firm Multiply Group are co-investors in the group.
Crossfin COO Anton Gaylard says the acquisition creates a compelling value proposition for South African corporates.
"According to the latest Deloitte Human Capital Trends, only 24% of South African companies feel they are effectively using compensation and rewards as part of a differentiated employee experience. As the war for talent escalates, companies will increasingly look to new ways to improve employee engagement to reward and retain top talent. By leveraging the extensive expertise and resources of the Crossfin group, we believe we've helped our subsidiary Innervation take a leading position in the local corporate rewards space."
Edenred SA was part of the internationally listed Edenred Group, and has been providing the South African market with card-based incentives, rewards and expense management solutions since 2005.
It has more than 450 000 active cards with an annual issuance value of over R250 million in the South African market.
According to Vaughan Alexander, managing executive at Innervation, the acquisition of the rewards business enables Innervation to expand the acceptance of the rewards cards into many of its existing retail customers.
"This deal aligns with Innervation's vision to become a market leader in card issuance and account management of open, closed and filtered loop programmes. With this acquisition, we are able to expand our offering of competitively priced, customisable, re-loadable card-based incentive programmes to employees with options to enable the cardholder to spend the value at any MasterCard accepting merchant or at a preselected list of approximately 5 000 stores within the Edenred South Africa retail network."
"As a group, our extensive footprint and domain experience in the traditional card acquiring space is well complemented by Edenred SA's experience in card issuing," Gaylard agrees. "We've also created new opportunities among some of our Blue Chip clients to add additional value to the current offering, and we will be complementing this further with a mobile offering."
Laurent Pellet, COO of Asia-Pacific and Middle East at Edenred Global, says of the deal: "As part of our 'fast-forward strategy' and focusing on our core operations, we chose to divest our interest in Edenred South Africa. We believe the transaction will prove to be beneficial both for the employees and the new shareholders and wish all these parties well in the future."
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