Payments Firm MFS Africa Buys US FinTech Global Technology Partners

Digital payment company MFS Africa is set to acquire the U.S. FinTech Global Technology Partners to help issue prepaid cards — a rare incident of an African company buying a U.S. one, the Financial Times reported Monday (June 6).

The acquisition will let MFS help out the hundreds of millions of people who don’t have bank accounts in Africa. Instead, they store money on mobile phones or on digital wallets. International companies like Netflix and Amazon, however, don’t take those kinds of payments from Africa.

Dare Okoudjou, founder and CEO of MFS, said the purchase of Global Technology Partners would help create solutions and help international platforms “which are not able or willing to create the user experience that will accept mobile.”

He said MFS has also recently worked with Spotify to help the streaming company accept mobile payments from Kenya, Uganda and South Africa.

In October of last year, MFS Africa also purchased Capricorn Digital, the parent company of Baxi, which gives users access to ways to solve payment issues for everyday things like utility bills or flight purchases.

Read more: MFS Africa Acquires Baxi Parent Company Capricorn Digital

At the time, Capricorn founder and CEO Degbola Abudu said the acquisition was the second-highest FinTech deal in Nigeria, coming in second to the $200 million Stripe paid for Paystack in 2020.

“We’re thrilled to partner with the MFS Africa team to expand our service offering for individuals and SMEs. We believe that we’ve barely scratched the market’s potential,” Abudu said. “Only 3% of Nigerian SMEs have access to credit products.”

Capricorn Digital had plans to add to its staff of over 90,000 agents in Nigeria, with MFS being the biggest FinTech interoperability hub in Africa, connecting to roughly 320 million customers.

The report noted that Baxi processed over $1 billion in transactions in 2021 through various product offerings that constituted an online ecosystem of payments services.