Brit firm pours A$37m into local banking IT specialist

British identity software specialist GBGroup has conditionally acquired Melbourne-based reseller DecTech for GB£20.5 million ($37.2 million).

The Australian Microsoft partner will provide GBGroup with a gateway into the Asian market. DecTech has offices in Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Seoul, and Manila, in addition to a European branch in Barcelona.

"This acquisition extends our capability and geographic reach," said GBGroup CEO Richard Law.

The buyout announced last week consists of GB£14.3 million cash ($26 million) plus GB£6.2 million dependent on future performance.

DecTech provides fraud detection and credit application software for the banking, finance and insurance clients.

GBGroup said in a statement that DecTech software is "used in 42 countries around the world and can support multiple languages and character sets". The company cites the Korean Fraud Bureau as one of its high profile clients.

DecTech founder and CEO, Sean Hollingdale, will be retained, while GBGroup said it "will invest in additional management resource, including a sales director, business development resource, a CFO and a European product manager together with an increase in marketing".

Hollingdale said: "The founders and leadership of DecTech believe that by joining GBGroup we will enhance our leading fraud detection and prevention solutions whilst further enabling our risk management and customer on-boarding capabilities."

GBGroup said the strategy for the new union was to "target tier 2 banks where DecTech has a presence", diversify into insurance and e-commerce platforms, and develop relationships with fraud bureaus.

"Both have global capability and together will deliver the leading identity and fraud suite which is data agnostic and can be deployed with cross border or local expertise," said GBGroup's managing director John Lord.

DecTech was founded in 2001 and posted a GB£2.3 million profit last year with revenues of GB£5.8 million, while its new parent GBGroup racked up GB£36.3 million in revenue last year.