Life.Sreda, a Russian fund investing in financial and mobile technologies, has acquired iboxPro, a leading Asian mobile point-of-sale service, and intends to merge it with its Russian portfolio company LifePay.
The details of the transaction have not been disclosed, but an unnamed source told business daily Kommersant that it amounted to “up to $10 million.”
Tapping into iboxPro’s networks in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, Life.Sreda aims to create a market leader in Southeast Asia. A new company, christened ‘LifePay Global,’ is being created with headquarters in Singapore.
LifePay Global, which plans further expansion to the Chinese and Philippine markets, has set for itself the goal of processing $40 million worth transactions per month by the end of 2015.
The company is also hoping to launch a number of new services, including online loads, online acquisitions, and digital wallet services.
“The reason for our attention to mPOS projects is the fact that today they are the fastest-growing. That is quite understandable: they have one of the lowest CPAs and the highest customer base growth rate. No other financial technology demonstrates such growth speed, low customer acquisition cost, and upwell capabilities,” international tech blog Tech Cocktail quoted Vladislav Solodkiy, LifePay Global Managing Director, as saying.
“Today’s main competitive advantage is the ability to use data, analyze it the right way, and implement the results. Modern smartphones and tablets turn each payment into a unique source of data valuable for management and development,” said John Langer, Chairman of the Board at ibox.
Life.Sreda announced recently its intention to support actively the development of LifePay, which it considers to be its most promising project in Russia. The new Life.Sreda II fund focuses exclusively on foreign markets.