Barely days after it secured $5 million debt facility for its consumer facing platform Paylater, One Finance (OneFi) said on Thursday it has completed the acquisition of Amplify Payments.
OneFi which is the first financial technology (Fintech) startup in Nigeria to acquire another fintech company in 2019, completed the deal for an undisclosed fee on March 1. With the acquisition, OneFi will be enabled to diversify its financial service offerings as Amplify’s assets, tradements and flagship products, Amplify and mTransfers, are added to its growing portfolio.
According to a statement sent to BusinessDay, Amplify was conceived in 2015 by co-founders Segun Adeyemi and Maxwell Obi, who first met as Entrepreneurs-in-Training at MEST Africa’s Entrepreneurial Training Program in Accra, Ghana. The company has scaled quickly to become an online recurring payment processor that supports over 1,000 merchants and facilitating digital transactions for four of Nigeria’s largest banks.
Chijioka Dozie, OneFi founder and CEO had disclosed last week that OneFi had plans to not only double its size within its primary market Nigeria but to diversify its portfolio of services which necessitated plans to rebrand Paylater, its flagship platform by April. With the addition of AmplifyPay – a payment gateway specialising in recurring transactions – and mTransfers – a keyboard banking solution that enables consumers to conduct bill and peer-to-peer payments in any chat app – OneFi is better positioned to fulfil those ambitions.
Although Dozie declined to reveal to BusinessDay what new nomenclature Paylater will be bearing from April, he did say to expect a name that reflects the expanded portfolio of innovative services. One of the services that the company plans to bring to the fintech space is QR payment solution.
With the QR payment solution, Paylater is hoping to disrupt the Point of Sale (PoS) market in Nigeria. There are currently 120,000 active PoS merchants with over 50 per cent of transactions occurring in Lagos alone. Paylater plans to leverage Nigeria’s 150 million active mobile connections to help millions of customers carry out transactions and drive offline payments via lower cost QR installations.
Maxwell, one of the co-founders of Amplify noted that the decision to work with OneFi was necessitated by the alignment of visions.
“We stepped into this industry to use our payment solutions to facilitate a growing economy and OneFi’s focus on financial inclusion feeds well into this,” Maxwell said. “It is a real example of a collaborative effort, and I am excited to see the next chapter of our development.”
Dozie described the announcement as a strategic decision that kicks off the company’s transformation from a digital lender to a diverse digital financial services platform focused on transactions, payments and loans and will ensure OneFi meets its ambitious goal of doubling its size in Nigeria in 2019.
“We have long respected the Amplify team for their ability to provide innovative solutions under adverse conditions, and we look forward to blending our expertise to power the future of fintech infrastructure and digital payments in Africa,” Dozie said.
Amplify secured its first investment from MEST Africa, the Pan-African incubator, training program and seed fund, in 2016, when Adeyemi and Obi graduated from the program and the company officially launched.
