Mauritius-based payments technology company VantagePay has announced that Crossfin Holdings has acquired a “meaningful stake” in the business for an undisclosed sum.
VantagePay, previously ZappGroup Africa Limited and V2 Limited, was established in 2018 with a goal to provide leading payment and technology services across Africa. Headquartered in Mauritius, with offices in South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria and London, VantagePay is currently providing payments solutions to leading Ghanaian banks, telcos and fintech with plans to expand into several African countries in the coming years.
Co-founder Paul Edwards is a former CEO of MTN and Multichoice, and more recently founding executive chairman of Emerging Markets Payments (EMP), the latter of which was launched in 2010 and in six years had become the leading pan-African and pan-Middle Eastern payments processor.
“Africa represents a huge market for mobile payments, given the relatively high mobile phone penetration coupled with a relatively low penetration of financial services,” said Edwards. “VantagePay has incorporated the learnings of EMP and other countries, such as China, in developing a business model that enables cost-effective, deep penetration of payment services into African markets.”
Barry Lobel, VantagePay’s CEO and co-founder, welcomed the investment from Crossfin.
“VantagePay has developed a leading cloud-based payments platform to address the massive latent demand for access to trusted financial services in Africa. The modular architecture of our platform enables a great deal of synergy and complimentary offerings between VantagePay and Crossfin’s portfolio companies,” he said.
Crossfin is a leading independent fintech group, with a particular focus on payments technologies and smart funding. Its portfolio companies include Adumo, the leading independent omnichannel payment acquiring business in South Africa; Crossgate, a card issuer and alliance banking solution enabler for retailers, banks and non-bank institutions; and Retail Capital, a SMME-focused smart funder.
Dean Sparrow, Crossfin’s CEO, said the company had identified VantagePay as a potential leader in the African mobile payments space.
“The business has a superior payments platform that has already been adopted by numerous banks, telcos and fintech platforms and is well placed to expand rapidly across the African continent. It also has a very experienced management team that has proven capability in developing successful pan-African payments companies,” he said.
“We feel that Crossfin is an excellent partner for VantagePay and believe they will stand out in an increasingly competitive payments space. We look forward to leveraging the many identified synergies with our portfolio companies whilst also assisting VantagePay in achieving its goal of becoming a leading pan-African payments facilitator.”
