Sage Group confirms North American payments business is up for sale; to retain UK & Ireland and South Africa payments businesses
04 MAY 2017
Sage Group [LON:SGE], a UK-based software company, has confirmed that it has put its North American payments business up for sale. Sage also said it will retain ownership of its payments businesses in South Africa and the UK and Ireland. The relevant extract from Sage Group’s 1HY17 results announcement of Wednesday, 3 May follows:
Update on our payments and banking strategy
The golden triangle remains integral to our strategy. Earlier in the year we announced a review of our payments and banking capabilities, which has now made significant progress. Today we reconfirm our commitment as a key participant in the global payments and banking services ecosystem, increasing our focus on deeply embedding payments and banking services within our accounting, payroll and people products, to help customers move and manage their money in many more geographies than we do today.
Execution of this strategy involves:
‒ Leveraging existing payments capability where it is complementary to our core business model and growth aspirations, like in South Africa where payments capabilities are deeply integrated within our software, and in the UK & Ireland, which is growing strongly through e-commerce;
‒ Evolving and adding to our existing strong and stable partnerships in this area with leading payment and technology companies such as PayPal, Verifone, Elavon, Mastercard, American Express, and major banks in key geographies;
‒ Exiting those areas where the fit with our core business is not as strong.
We can therefore confirm that our North American payments business is now held for sale but we plan to retain the payments businesses in UK & Ireland and South Africa.