Payments and technology company Vantage Africa, trading as VantagePay, has announced that Crossfin Holdings has acquired a meaningful stake for an undisclosed sum.
Barry Lobel, VantagePay’s CEO and co-founder, comments: “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.”
Dean Sparrow, Crossfin’s CEO, says Crossfin 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.
“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,” says Sparrow.
Paul Edwards, executive chairman and co-founder of VantagePay, is a former CEO of MTN and Multichoice and more recently founding executive chairman of Emerging Markets Payments (EMP).
“Africa represents a huge market for mobile payments, given the relatively high mobile phone penetration coupled with a relatively low penetration of financial services,” says 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.”
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.
Crossfin is an independent fintech group and counts as its major shareholders Ethos Mid-Market Fund and leading empowerment investor African Rainbow Capital. Crossfin has 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; Retail Capital, a SMME focussed smart funder; and Sybrin, which provides Artificial Intelligence-enabled enterprise software to banks across Africa.