Stake of 76% in Mena FinTech Tpay is sold
A15, a technology investment company based in the Cayman Islands, has sold its 76 per cent stake in Egyptian FinTech company Tpay Mobile – the first major FinTech exit for the Middle East and North Africa region.
The stake was sold for an undisclosed sum to Helios Investment Partners, one of Africa’s biggest private equity firms with offices in London and Nairobi.
“A15 and Tpay’s management have built an outstanding mobile payments platform that is profitable and still has a lot of room for growth in Africa and beyond given its applicability to a wide range of payment types,” Babatunde Soyoye, co-founder and managing partner of Helios said yesterday.
“We are on track to double our year-on-year revenue in 2019,” said Sahar Salama, co-founder and chief executive of Tpay, without revealing current revenues.
Under the transaction, A15 and Tpay’s executive team will remain invested in 24 per cent of the company.
Tpay launched in Egypt in 2014 as the first open mobile payments platform in the Mena region. Today, it has an 80 per cent share of the direct operator billing market with 673 million users across 16 countries, the company said.
The number of active digital content subscriptions set up through the platform has risen at an annual growth rate of 149 per cent since 2015, the company said, and Tpay has processed 622 million transactions since its launch, through partnerships with 33 mobile operators.
The company also has partnerships with GooglePlay, Wargaming, NetDragon, CrossFire, Opensouq, MBC, iFlix, Abu Dhabi Media and Dubai Channels Network.
The global direct operator billing industry is expected to register 23 per cent growth each year from 2018 to 2022, according to the latest figures from Juniper Research.In the Middle East, the sector is becoming popular as companies seek to broaden payment options for the estimated 86 per cent of adults in Mena who do not have a bank account, according to a study from payments provider Payfort.
The region registered a 23 per cent increase in online payments in 2015, illustrating the fast paced growth of FinTech.
The Mena region is also among the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, presenting opportunities for new mobile platforms.
A15 said through the transaction it becomes the first fund in Mena to create a “dragon” company from one of its investments. A dragon is the term used in the start-up and venture capital world to describe an investment that returns the entire value of the fund when exited.
“In this case, Tpay returned a multiple of the value of the entire A15 Fund to its investors, a liquidity event that is very rare in the global tech investment space and a first of its kind in the Mena region,” A15 said.