South Africa’s Mergence Group bought a 26% stake in 2Engage a local customer reward start-up as part of global expansion plans targeting retail consumers. Mergence, which started out as an asset manager in 2004, is diversifying revenue away from institutional clients and expanding into commodity finance, investment management and corporate solutions.
What we are looking for is a way to grow our financial services platform, grow it fast and grow it across borders. That’s the big attraction for us here, MD Masimo-a-badimo Magerman said
Mergence group plans to increase its stake in 2Engage by about 25% by the end of next year, which would make it its largest shareholder. 2Engage’s Retail Engage unit runs rewards and loyalty programs in supermarkets and wholesalers for low- to middle-income earners, that it says accounts for 60% of South Africa’s economically active population.
We can go anywhere in the world with this technology and it’s an LSM that we love and we are going to focus on. It’s the last mile. And the last mile, as the brands will tell you, is very difficult to penetrate. We want to grow our footprint roughly to 30 to 40 million people around the world. Magerman said
2Engage operates in about 15 African countries and Mergence plans to spend around R150-million to expand in Asia and South America. In the next three years, the company plans to expand as fast as possible and then integrate simultaneously financial services products.
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