Beyonic acquistion to increase market access

What you need to know:

  • For local businesses, the acquisition will open more borders, allowing them to transact beyond the nine markets in which Beyonic has operations.

MFS Africa, a digital payments platform, has acquired Ugandan startup, Beyonic at an undisclosed amount.
Founded by Mr Luke Kyohere, Beyonic is a mobile money aggregator linking enterprises to digital payments through mobile money among other functions.
Beyonic is also the aggregator of SafeBoda cashless transactions.
Revealing the acquistion in a statement released last week, Mr Dare Okoudjou, founder and chief executive officer MFS Africa said; “With the MFS Africa Hub, we have been creating new digital pathways between mobile money users in Africa and the global economy. With the acquisition of Beyonic, we can now put this digital payment network at the service of those entrepreneurs whether they are SMEs, fintechs or social impact organisations.”

He added, “By combining MFS Africa’s and Beyonic’s assets and capabilities, we can unleash the wealth of opportunity that business within Africa and with Africa presents to the wider world.”
Extended access and functionality, the fintech said, will become available to customers of both organisations in the second half of 2020.

Implication
According to Ms Doreen Lukandwa, director marketing and customer success, the move is more of a merger of the two entities.
“Beyonic is going to remain with the brand name Beyonic but it is going to become a product line within MFS Africa. MFS Africa is a hub that primarily focuses on remittances specifically target money transfer organisations and multinationals. So they wanted to extend their services into East Africa on a bigger scale and also go a bit farther in terms of last mile solutions,” she says.
The acquistion also saw MFS Africa taking on all Beyonic staff, meaning no jobs have been lost.

For local businesses, the acquisition will open more borders, allowing them to transact beyond the nine markets in which Beyonic has operations.
“They would be able to tap into geographical expansion where Beyonic initially was present in nine markets will now be present in an additional 34,” she explained adding; “An SME or organisation here will transact cross-border. So you can continue to scale your e-commerce business from here.”
In addition, Beyonic will now also extend visa capability through MFS Africa.
Essentially, the move will make it easier and cheaper for a new business to penetrate other markets in Africa.