Radius Payment Solutions buys again to strengthen telecom arm

Radius Payment Solutions has made its seventh acquisition in the space of seven weeks after picking up Macclesfield-based Reliance Networks

Radius has been on a journey to diversify its business from being a fuel card company to a provider of fleet management solutions ad increasingly a range of additional services to more than 300,000 customers.

One of the areas it has been driving growth in on the telecoms front and the Reliance deal will add extra muscle on that side of the business. The terms of the acquisition were  not disclosed.

Bill Holmes, chief executive of Radius Payment Solutions, said that it was closing out the year having made a number of deals, with several of those being on the telecoms front.

“The acquisition of Reliance Networks supports Radius’ ambition to grow a market leading telecoms division. Reliance is a really good fit for our growing telecoms business as it has some unique technical capacities that will complement those of the other companies that have recently joined this division. This marks the seventh deal we have completed in the last seven weeks, three of which have been in Telecoms,” he said.

Those other deals have included the acquisition of business telecoms player Trinity Maxwell in late November to bring on board both the skills and a customer base in London and surrounding areas. Earlier in the month Radius also picked up Shrewsbury-based Pure Telecom.

Radius first moved into the telecoms market in October last year after buying independent mobile and fixed line specialist Adam Phones. It followed that up with the launch in June of its own Echo Telecoms brand to offer mobile tariffs, hosted telephony and internet for business customers.

At the time Holmes said that it had an ambition to offer, "a wide range of telecoms solutions for SMEs and existing fleet customers" and it has been adding to that in the past couple of months.

Last month Radius also made an appointment to back up its ambitions bringing in Ray Ferris as group managing director of telecoms with a brief to oversee developments in this area. He came from BT, where he had served as head of its indirect channel and business development for corporate.