The Caribbean’s largest digital payments company, WiPay, has sold a five percent equity stake in its Jamaican subsidiary to a recently formed investment company led a former Sagicor Jamaican executive.

WiPay’s founder and CEO, Aldwyn Wayne said he chooses Roots Financial a company founded by Kevin Donaldson, last week from a list of seven potential suitors. These were Jamaican investment companies that were anxious to acquire a stake in WiPay Jamaica.

‘’We have received a great deal of investment and partnership interest since our soft rollout of WiPay Jamaica in January. That interest heightened in March, when we rolled out our version one of our curfew platform called ENDS (E-commerce National Delivery System) and again in April when we launched Project 1000, which created a Guinness World Record for developing 1,000 websites for small and medium sized Jamaican businesses in one day,” said Wayne, in an interview yesterday.

Wayne said he chose Donaldson’s company over the other players in the space because of an alignment of their visions to end the exclusion of the unbanked and underbanked in the Caribbean.

“Roots Financial is headed by one of the leading investment minds in Jamaica and the value we will get from the partnership is worth way more to WiPay than the equity investment,” said Wayne.

He revealed that Donaldson flew to Trinidad in 2018 to discuss WiPay and the possibilities and partnering or even acquiring the company.

“He believed in the WiPay vision when it was less than one year old,” said Wayne.

In an interview with the Sunday Express on Thursday, Donaldson said Roots Financial will serve as WiPay’s advisor to help the company grow throughout the region. He will also serve as a director on the board of WiPay Jamaica.

“We are looking to improve WiPay’s offerings, so that whenever you get a WiPay account, you do not need to go to anybody else. You would be able to transact all your financial business through that platform, which we think would lead to the democratization of wealth in the region by giving people more opportunities to build their own businesses,” Donaldson said.

Asked about WiPay’s plan to take its Jamaican subsidiary public in the fourth quarter of 2021, Donaldson confirmed that Roots Financial will provide financial and other kinds of advice for the offering.

“I am his partner in whatever he will be doing across the region,” said Donaldson.

“Kevin’s expertise and experience will be critical to our listing in Jamaica because of his knowledge of the capital markets space in the country,” Wayne said.

Donaldson’s career at Sagicor started in 2003, he left to work at Grace Kennedy’s financial arm in 2011, and returned to Sagicor in 2016.

As CEO of Sagicor Investments Jamaica, Donaldson was responsible for taking several companies in Jamaica public. These include Sygnus Group, a non-traditional financial solutions firm and Dolphin Cove, a tourism company. He also arranged the J$5 billion funding for the acquisition of 75 per cent of Barita Investment by the Cornerstone group in 2018.

He said the team he led at Sagicor Investment was responsible for introducing new products to the Jamaican market. The example of this was two Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) called Sagicor Select Funds that are listed on the Jamaican Stock Exchange-one indexed to the financial companies on the Jamaican stock exchange and the other to the manufacturing and distribution companies.

“We also did several private equity transactions that are similar to the investment that Roots is now making in WiPay,” said Donaldson, citing the funding of One-on-One Educational Services, an online tutoring platform that is used in Jamaica and was snapped up by the Bahamas after the damage inflicted by Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

Donaldson left Sagicor Investments last year after the company underwent restructuring.

Story Courtesy: Trinidad Business Express