Orange announced today it has acquired a majority of Groupama and will use the service to launch a new mobile banking service. No surprise and a trend that has been in the making for the last decade of combinations of Retail Banking and Telco's for payments and micro lending is growing. If you believe in that the future is mobile lead, you can imagine that the telo's with each 10-50x more customers than banks, have pressure on their economics are keen on finding an opportunity to cross sell financial services on their customer base
The former Groupama, a financial services and insurance company, will be re-named “Orange Bank” in 2017 and will be a pure mobile banking play. Orange acquired 65 percent of Groupama after months of exclusive talks that began in January. The companies did not disclose the price of the deal. “This will enable us to move forward rapidly in order to provide our customers with an innovative, 100 percent mobile banking service, first in France and then in Spain and Belgium,” said Stéphane Richard, chairman and chief executive of Orange, said in a statement. “By leveraging the power of its brand, its distribution network and its extensive experience in digital services, Orange aims to bring mobile banking into a new dimension.”
