Isabel Group acquires 50% of Doccle
Telecom company Telenet and FinTech company Isabel Group announced today that they are continuing the digital platform Doccle together and want to take it to a higher level. Earlier this year, Telenet entered into an agreement with Acerta and the National Relief Fund (Christelijke Mutualtiteit, hereinafter referred to as “CM”) to acquire their shares and has now entered into an agreement with Isabel Group to acquire its 50% of the shares to sell in Doccle. Telenet and Isabel Group will each own half of the company within a short period of time.
The entry into Doccle fits in with the strategy of Isabel Group, which also owns Zoomit, among others, to further digitize payments, administration and document management. For Telenet, this acquisition and subsequent sale of part of the shares is in line with Telenet’s ambition to make maximum efforts to digitize customer experiences. Telenet and Isabel Group want to invest an additional 5 million euros in the coming years to make Doccle the platform of the future.
Doccle is the largest digital administration platform in Belgium. The platform was founded as an independent start-up in 2012 by Telenet, Acerta and the Nationaal Hulpfonds (CM) to bundle their digital administration. More than 2.2 million Belgians now receive, manage and store more than 125 million documents per year on Doccle. Thanks to the interactive app that collects all documents in a reliable digital environment, Doccle offers safe, simple and fast management of personal administration. Every Belgian can receive his government documents on Doccle by connecting to eBox. The company works together with hundreds of large and small companies and organizations from all possible sectors, such as: payroll administrators, water companies, banks, insurance companies, social insurance funds for the self-employed, health insurance companies, and even waste management companies.
Doccle is now ready for a new growth phase to organize the digital administration of families and the self-employed even better, by integrating innovative digital applications such as automating billing flows and linking insights and actions on documents in the platform. Because both Acerta and CM do not see these further developments as part of their strategy, Telenet Group Holding entered into an agreement earlier this year to acquire their shares and started looking for a strategic partner to realize that growth.
On 10 June 2021, Isabel Group signed an agreement to purchase 50% of Telenet’s participation in Doccle following the buy-out of Acerta and CM by Telenet.
Together, Telenet and Isabel Group want to take Doccle to a higher level and make it the digital platform of the future. Both residential customers and companies need a low-threshold but super-secure environment where they can carry out all transactions related to administration, exchanging data with suppliers, ordering online, paying, following up or canceling transactions in no time at all. In other words: Doccle must become the safest digital document and data safe that combines archiving, filtering and consulting documents with, in due course, also new forms of payment, viewing payment history, etc.
The entry is fully in line with Isabel Group’s strategy: with Zoomit and payment platform Isabel, among others, it has been focusing on the digitization of payments for decades.
Isabel Group simplifies the management of payments, identity and administration through digitization. In addition to our contribution to companies, we also consider the digitization of Belgian households as part of our social role. This has already resulted in products such as Zoomit and initiatives such as Digicrowd. Our engagement in Doccle must offer new possibilities to both end users and partners in the field of smart automation. We are therefore very much looking forward to working with Telenet to boost this innovative platform and thus further lower the digital threshold in our country.
Together with Isabel Group, we hope to continue working on our ambition to get all Belgians on the digital highway. Doccle is a platform that has grown rapidly and is now ready to take a new step in its development. With its experience in online payment platforms, Isabel Group has the right profile to support this evolution. We are therefore pleased to be able to work with a strong partner on digital solutions for consumer document and data management, but also to give companies the opportunity to join the most innovative platform where their customers can receive, store and handle all their documents in one place.
We are convinced that the entry of Isabel Group is positive for the future of Doccle. At the same time, we would like to thank Doccle co-founders Acerta and CM. Partly thanks to them and Telenet, Doccle got off to a flying start. From day one, Doccle was obliged to build a platform that could reconcile the different needs of completely different companies and that had to be able to handle many transactions on a large scale. There is a need for even greater simplification of digital administration and clarity for people on how to organize themselves around this. It is our ambition, together with Isabel Group and Telenet, to be the platform that offers this simplicity and clarity.
