Deloitte Digital gobbles up Fintech agency Jinja Interactive

Deloitte Digital has made another raid into the specialist agency space. On Monday, the full services consultancy announced its acquisition of Jinja Interactive — a Cape Town-based strategy, design and app development agency.

In a press release sent to Memeburn, Deloitte Digital said it sees the acquisition as part of its strategy to build a fully-integrated digital transformation business, providing digital innovation and customer-centric engagement solutions to its rapidly growing list of clients across Africa.

According to the release, Jinja Interactive will be particularly useful bolstering its offerings around digital financial services and fintech innovation.

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“We’re very happy to have the Jinja Interactive team joining us at Deloitte Digital,” says Deloitte Digital’s leader, Valter Adão. “They will help reinforce our ability to set ourselves apart by engaging our clients with strategic and innovative thinking, emerging and exponential technologies and creative design.”

Established in 2006 Jinja Interactive is a relatively small player in the digital agency space, having crafted a niche for itself, building solutions for financial services clients.

“We’re excited about combining Jinja Interactive’s deep-level understanding of financial services in a digital world, its reputation in the industry, its existing client base and its skilled team, with Deloitte’s state-of-the-art methods, processes, ability to scale through skilled resources as well as global brand recognition,” says Morné Fischer, formerly Jinja Interactive Managing Director, and now Deloitte Digital Associate Director.

“Jinja Interactive’s core service offering remains strategy, design and digital development for wealth or asset management, with a specific focus on digital investment and advice management.

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“Digital Advice Management (aka Robo Advisory Services) has been a major growth market in recent years in mature economies, but is only starting to gain traction in South Africa. We believe that this global trend is perfectly suited to the South African market – it keeps investor costs down in an increasingly price-sensitive market, and it allows businesses to decrease the costs to administer individual investment portfolios, thereby broadening their market,” says Fischer.

“We’re at a point where our clients agree that small incremental changes will not guarantee survival in this market. Breakthrough technology is what’s needed and they’re either going for it or they’re playing catch-up,” he concludes.

It’s unclear how much the deal is worth, but it is yet another signal that the local chapter of Deloitte Digital is serious about increasing the number of digital services it can offer its clients. That’s in line with a global strategy that led to WPP chairman Sir Martin Sorrell in 2014 telling The Drum that his company now considers Deloitte (its auditor) a “frenemy”.