Ingka Investments invests $22.5M in Jifiti for minority stake

By Edlyn Cardoza

Ingka Investments, the investment arm of Ingka Group, owner, and operator of 389 IKEA stores and e-commerce in 32 countries, and Jifiti, a FinTech company, recently announced that Ingka Investments has invested US $22.5 million in Jifiti, for a minority stake in the company.

Jifiti facilitates white-labeled point-of-sale financing solutions for banks, lenders, and merchants. The investment is a recognition of the added value that Jifiti brings to the industry as a whole and will contribute to the wider IKEA Financial Services offer.

“Ingka Group is taking decisive steps into financial services, and a core part of our journey is to help make IKEA more affordable and accessible for our customers. This deal will further our integration of easily accessible financing solutions into the IKEA offering. Our investment in Jifiti is another exciting step for Ingka Investments as it follows our recent other financial services investment in Ikano Bank. We are confident this new investment will support us even more in becoming a life-long partner to our customers by helping to improve their life at home and grow their businesses,” stated Krister Mattsson, Managing Director of Ingka Investments.

Ingka Group and Jifiti have a long-standing commercial partnership, with Jifiti acting as a facilitator of IKEA Retail’s and consumer financing services. IKEA, with its local banking partners in Spain, France, Portugal, and Belgium, have already been offering financing in their stores via the Jifiti platform since 2019 and are now rolling out into other countries. The aim is to have the Jifiti platform facilitate the IKEA in-store and e-commerce point-of-sale financing across markets. Ingka Group and Jifiti will collaborate to develop and extend IKEA Retail’s financial services to its 706 million annual in-store customers and 3.6 billion e-commerce visitors worldwide.

Yaacov Martin, CEO and co-founder of Jifiti, said, “When two companies as aligned as Jifiti and Ingka Group take their partnership to the next level through investment, it signals the first of many exciting changes in the landscape of the industry. This investment will empower both our organizations to achieve our goals in the point-of-sale financing space and fuel Jifiti’s technological and international growth. A partnership, such as ours, that serves the vision and purpose of both parties is poised for success and will have a positive impact on the BNPL industry.”

Jifiti’s white-labeled platform enables leading banks, lenders, and merchants to easily and seamlessly deploy BNPL (buy now pay later) programs at any merchant’s point-of-sale, online and in-store. Jifiti will be using the investment from Ingka Group to embark on its next growth phase and achieve its goal of becoming the market-leading point-of-sale financing platform. The company plans to enhance its technological and product development and scale internationally to new markets. Jifiti is, and will remain, bank, card network and retailer agnostic, and will retain full independence and control over its operations.

The investment is the latest in a series of investments made by Ingka Group that will strengthen its core IKEA retail business by investing in innovative companies in areas such as digitalization, customer fulfilment, FinTech and sustainability that support its ongoing transformation to become ever more affordable, accessible, and sustainable.