AZB advises Sodexo in its acquire of Indian fintech Zeta

AZB & Partners advised Sodexo PASS International SAS (Sodexo France) led by a team of Partners named Ashwath Rau, Dhruv Singhal and Ami Parikh, Senior Associate Himanshoo Tembe, Senior Associate Shivanand Nayak, Senior Associate Apeksha Mattoo and Senior Associate Rashmee Kumar, and Associate Shriyani Datta, Associate Pooja Natarajan, Associate Prithvi Bhaskar, Associate Ronak Agarwal, Associate Megha Tiwari, Associate Pooja Natarajan, Associate Shruti Sundararajan, Associate Rachana Rautray and Associate Vyjayanthi Raghu.

Sodexo announced that its Benefits & Rewards Services (BRS) activity has entered into final discussions to take a strategic minority stake in Zeta, which has been partnering with Sodexo BRS India since 2017. This investment will be part of BRS’s on-going strategic initiatives to reinforce its technology and development capacities to accelerate digitization in all its activities around the world.

It was opined that beyond BRS, the whole of the Sodexo group will also benefit from Zeta’s comprehensive technological suite of seamless payment solutions to foster synergies across activities ultimately benefiting its 100 million consumers. Zeta and Sodexo are already working on deploying Zeta’s know-how in several BRS subsidiaries in different regions, such as in Latin America and in Asia.

The press release read, "Our investment in Zeta will give us the opportunity to accelerate our digitization journey globally. This investment will bring together the agility and technical skills of Zeta and Sodexo’s expertise in Employee Benefits Services to enhance the overall Employee Experience”.

“Zeta’s vision is to accelerate the movement towards a world where payments are invisible. Today’s banking and fintech ecosystem require cloud-native, privacy-aware, inherently secure, API first banking and payment solutions”. says Bhavin Turakhia, Co-Founder and CEO of Zeta. “With this new capital, Zeta would look at expanding its business in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Southeast Asia. We have already begun hiring senior leadership in US & UK. We will be operating in over 20 countries with over 25 million users on our platform in the next 2 years”