Sinch enters India with £56m ACL Mobile acquisition

Sinch CEO, Oscar Werner

Sinch, which specialises in cloud communications for mobile customer engagement, has entered the India and Southeast Asia market with the acquisition of ACL Mobile, a leading provider of cloud services in the region, for £56m. In the 12 months ending March 2020, ACL Mobile delivered 47 billion messages on behalf of its enterprise customers.

The deal represents Sinch’s 12th acquisition since its IPO in 2015, including its most recent ones, Communications Platform as a Service company, SAP Digital Interconnect, for £198m last month and Latin American business messaging provider Wavy for £98m in March.

Founded in 2000, ACL Mobile’s platform enables businesses to interact with their customers through multiple channels, including SMS, voice, email, IP messaging, and WhatsApp. The company serves more than 500 enterprise customers and is particularly successful in the Banking and Financial Services industry, where its proprietary Axiom platform offers intelligent routing and granular access controls that specifically cater to the stringent security requirements of financial institutions.

Leading financial institutions who rely on ACL technology include HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak and IndusInd Bank. Customers in other segments include a wide range of businesses, such as Amway, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip and OLX. The company employs 288 people with headquarters in Delhi and overseas offices in Dubai and Kuala Lumpur.

“With ACL we gain critical scale in the worlds second-largest mobile market,” said Sinch CEO, Oscar Werner. “We gain customers, expertise and technology and we further strengthen our global messaging product for discerning businesses with global needs.”

India is the world’s second-largest mobile market, with a population exceeding 1.3 billion. It is a fast-growing, mobile-first economy that benefits from rapid digitisation and rising smartphone penetration. Economic growth and government initiatives for greater digital inclusion are also driving increased use of financial services, a development that fuels demand for transaction notifications via SMS.

Sinch said that initial integration costs are estimated at SEK 17m (£1.45m), and that total synergies from the combination of Sinch, ACL Mobile and SAP Digital Interconnect will be assessed upon closing of the two transactions.