GoCompare buys 'Look After My Bills' for up to £12.5m
Goco Group
131.60p
17:15 16/02/21
GoCo Group has acquired This Is The Big Deal, trading as Look After My Bills, it announced on Thursday.
FTSE All-Share
4,387.94
16:49 25/04/24
FTSE Small Cap
6,412.53
17:14 25/04/24
Media
11,717.59
17:09 25/04/24
The London-listed firm said total consideration was comprised of £6.0m upfront, financed through its existing resources, as well as £2.5m deferred consideration, and up to a further £4.0m performance based earn-out, leading to a maximum potential consideration of £12.5m.
It said Look After My Bills had developed into one of the fastest growing energy savings services since appearing on BBC Dragon's Den in 2018, where it was awarded the best equity deal in the show's 13-year history.
It had already built a “significant” customer base in excess of 150,000 live customers, GoCo said.
The board added that it expected that like its Weflip division, the business benefited from a “transformative” business model with “deeper” customer relationships, leading to a greater loyalty and delivery of sustainable recurring revenue and higher customer lifetime value.
Energylinx, a subsidiary of the GoCo Group, already fulfilled the switching capabilities for Look After My Bills.
The acquisition would complement GoCo Group's mission of saving customers time and money, with the board expecting Weflip and Look After My Bills to lead to a “significantly higher” EBITDA margin profile for GoCo Group, and be transformative to group earnings by 2022.
“We are incredibly excited to announce this acquisition, which enables the group to continue to address consumer inertia,” said chief executive officer Matthew Crummack.
“Weflip and Look After My Bills complement each other in their approach to saving UK consumers money and with both brands we can target the significant saving opportunities that still exist for consumers, who haven't been tackled by existing price comparison websites or regulation.”
Together, Weflip and Look After My Bills would form the group's ‘AutoSave’ segment, which the board said was building momentum and was in a “great position” to address the needs of infrequent switchers.
“Our ambition is to rapidly scale customers and build our AutoSave business to grow live customers by at least 25% in the next five months to 31st December 2019.
“I look forward to welcoming Will, Henry and the rest of the team to the group.
“Jointly we have the skills, technology and discipline to address the substantial opportunity in addressing the 'infrequent switchers' and save the UK billions by switching.”