- Founded in 2011, Lydia is the leading French peer to peer payments application designed to make payments easier for individuals and businesses
- The Company’s application is a social interface to link phone with card and pay anyone with one app, enabling users to make issue-free payments through a mobile wallet system without carrying any cheques or ATM card
- Lydia is headquartered in Paris and currently operates across Europe, including France, UK, Spain and Portugal
- Since its foundation, Lydia has been downloaded by nearly 3 million individuals and by 25% of the 18-30 year old in France
- Tencent Holdings Limited (“Tencent”) is one of Asia’s largest Internet conglomerates with businesses and investments in a wide variety of Internet services and contents
- Key services include communication and social networking, online PC and mobile games, content, utilities, the cloud and fintech
- Tencent’s products and applications include WeChat (Social Media App), QQ (Instant Messaging), Tenpay (Payment Platform) and QQ Music (Music Streaming)
- The largest shareholder of Tencent is Naspers Limited, the South African multinational Internet group, which holds a c. 31% stake (1) in the Company
- The capital will support the Company’s next growth phase through:
- Facilitating further penetration in the European market
- Accelerating Lydia’s growth ambitions in the peer to peer payments market
- Strengthening partnerships and relationships within the financial industry
- Introduction to the shareholder base of a well-known and long-term provider of (strategic) capital
- Arma Partners served as exclusive financial advisor to Lydia on the transaction
- The transaction underscores Arma’s deep sector expertise in Digital Banking and Payments and strengthens its track record of successful capital raises in the French scale-up ecosystem (following transactions for Evaneos, Heetch and Talentsoft)
- The transaction further underlines the breadth of Arma’s developing Private & Growth Capital franchise and its ability to access diverse pools of capital, globally