Agreement for the sale of Quest Holdings’ participation in the companies Cardlink S.A. and Cardlink one S.A.

Press Release
May 27th, 2021

Agreement for the sale of Quest Holdings’ participation in the companies Cardlink S.A. and Cardlink one S.A.

Quest Holdings announces that at the late night of the 27th of May 2021, it has reached an agreement with the French company Worldline, for the sale of its stake in Cardlink S.A. and Cardlink one S.A. The completion of the transaction is subject to conditions including the approval of the Central Bank of Greece and the Central Bank of Belgium.

Cardlink and Cardlink one are active in the electronic payments sector, which is evolving to a full‐blown high‐tech market, attracting the interest of large multinational companies.

In that context Quest Group, decided to divest from Cardlink and Cardlink one, owning 65% of the share capital in each company at the time of the transaction. The consideration Quest Holdings is expected to receive amounts to circa €93m in cash. This results to a fifteen times (15x) return (circa €87 capital gains) on invested equity over a period of less than 7 years.

Quest Holdings has a long history in value creation for its subsidiaries, as well as in benefiting its employees and all relevant stakeholders. At the same time, Quest secures high returns for its shareholders when divesting from subsidiaries.

Deutsche Bank AG acted as financial advisor to Quest Holdings in connection with this transaction.

Worldline’s announcement can be seen here: https://investors.worldline.com/en/home/news-events/financial-press-releases/2021/pr-2021_05_28_01.html

About Cardlink

Cardlink was founded in 2004 and is the largest Network Service Provider in Greece with more than 290.000 terminals, 19.000 e-Commerce shops and 400 million transactions per year. Cardlink serves businesses in their daily transactions with quality, security and speed.  Cardlink’s team monitors the developments in the field of electronic payments, adopts the latest technologies and creates innovative products and services, which continually improve transactional experience in physical and electronic commerce. Since January 2015, Cardlink is a Quest Group company.