Gladstone Plc, a UK holding company owned by two veterans in payment cards, has paid 8.1m pounds ($13.1m) to acquire Microcache Ltd, which provides membership card systems for the leisure industry. Egham-based Gladstone’s chairman and chief executive Brian Raven says he wants the company to mirror the charge card system in retail, where shoppers have multiple applications on the cards. Raven and finance director Oliver Cooke originally worked at Card Clear Plc, a card fraud prevention technology company.
Microcache, headquartered in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, provides both magnetic stripe and smartcards worldwide. Over a quarter of the cards it produces are smartcards, and 75% of its revenue comes from the UK market. Last year, Microcache recorded profit of 500,000 pounds ($813,000) on revenue of approximately 4m pounds ($6.5m). Microcache uses smartcards from German manufacturer Orga, with chips by Siemens.
The company’s membership software, Clubman 2000, is a Windows-based system based on the SQL Server 7.0 which stores and tracks details of members, with separate modules for booking leisure facilities. It costs from 3,000 pounds ($4,800) for a simple system to 100,000 ($162,000) for a high-end model such as those used by local authorities to coordinate the running of several sport centers.
