Jamaican start-up financial holding Roots Financial Group has taken a five per cent equity stake in the local subsidiary of financial technology company WiPay Caribbean.

The acquisition is the culmination of a strategic alliance with Roots Financial Group, which was recently formed with the mandate of democratising wealth creation in Jamaica. Roots Financial is led by former Sagicor Investments Jamaica Limited Chief Executive Officer Kevin Donaldson, who parted company with Sagicor just under a year ago.

The sale was consummated about two weeks ago, paving the way for both companies to move forward in a strategic alliance, which will see Donaldson being appointed to the board of WiPay Jamaica.

The Jamaica Observer was unable to confirm the sale price for the five per cent equity stake.

In an exclusive interview with the Business Observer, Donaldson advised that part of his role will be structuring financial deals and seeking out partnerships on behalf of WiPay, which was started in 2016.

“Roots Financial will be helping WiPay to grow its business, not just in Jamaica but also across the region,” Donaldson explained, adding that “Roots Financial Group will be guiding WiPay in terms of mergers, acquisitions and the eventual public listing of the company.”

Making reference that Roots Financial is a holding company for investors, Donaldson reported that the company’s vision is to give ordinary Jamaicans the opportunities to create wealth.

In addition to the equity stake in WiPay and its strategic alliance with the company, Donaldson advises that “there is more to come. Everything is geared to make available opportunities for persons who never had access to funding and digital financial options”.

He said that Roots Financial is targeting the unbanked and under-banked, and with his partner, WiPay, will be providing financial service options for this group of clientèle.

WiPay’s founder and CEO Aldwyn Wayne reported that he chose Roots Financial two weeks ago from a list of seven potential suitors, which were all 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 roll-out of WiPay Jamaica in January,” Wayne said in an interview with the Trinidad Express. “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.”

Wayne added that 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 under-banked in the Caribbean. According to Wayne, “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.”

Asked about WiPay’s plan to take its Jamaican subsidiary public in the fourth quarter of 2021, Wayne said, “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.”

As CEO of Sagicor Investments, Donaldson was responsible for taking several companies in Jamaica public. These include Sygnus Group, a non-traditional financial solutions firm; and tourism company Dolphin Cove.

He also arranged the $5-billion funding for the acquisition of 75 per cent of Barita Investment by the Cornerstone group in 2018. He was responsible for introducing new products to the Jamaican market, among them two Exchange Traded Funds called Sagicor Select Funds, that are listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange, one indexed to the financial companies on the Jamaican stock market and the other to the manufacturing and distribution companies.