Singapore Exchange-listed Yoma Strategic Holdings announced today that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Yoma Strategic Investments, has agreed to purchase all of Telenor’s equity stake in Vietnamese Digital Money Myanmar, which owns and operates mobile financial services platform Wave Money.
The stake comprises 510,000 ordinary shares and 17,878,050 redeemable preference shares.
This comes just over a month after Ant Financial Services, operator of Alipay, announced a US$73.5 million investment in Wave Money.
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According to Lars Erik Tellmann, Head of Financial Services at Telenor, this deal comes at an “opportune time” for the group to divest its stake in Wave Money.
“Both Yoma Group and Ant Group’s core operation is financial services and technology and they are therefore the strongest owners to take Wave Money forward,” she said.
Yoma Strategic CEO Melvyn Pun added that Wave Money continues to see sustained growth in its agent and digital platforms, with Wave Pay gaining strong traction during the COVID-19 pandemic through the acceleration in and adoption of cashless payment solutions.
Launched in October 2018, Wave Money is a joint venture between Telenor, Yoma Bank and Yoma Strategic. The firm provides mobile financial services through a nationwide network of more than 57,000 agents or what it calls ‘Wave Shops’ in urban and rural areas, covering approximately 89 per cent of the region of Myanmar.
In 2019, Wave Money’s transfer volume claims to have more than tripled year-on-year reaching US$4.3 billion. More than 21 million people have used its platform for services such as remittances, utility payments, airtime top-ups and digital payments.
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Image Credit: Wave Money
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