The Competition Commission approved JD Group's acquisition of Absa Group's shareholding in Maravedi Group in December 2008, taking JD Group's shareholding of Maravedi Group up to 90,5%, with Thebe continuing to hold its 9,5% shareholding.

The Maravedi Group has two subsidiaries - Maravedi Financial Solutions (MFS) and Maravedi Credit Solutions (MCS). MFS provides unsecured loan products to customers with similar demographic profiles to customers within the Traditional Retail division of JD Group. It also provides secured loan products to customers with similar demographic profiles to customers within the Cash Retail division. MCS is in the process of repositioning itself specifically with respect to applying an increasing focus in coming years on the overdue debtors book of the JD Group.

As the division was created to develop new financial services, product and channel development projects were predominantly the focus in 2009, such as the development of shorter term, unsecured lending products, the establishment of its own larger footprint using the Traditional Retail footprint as leverage, as well as an agent channel.

The division initiated the process of integrating the Hi-Fi Corporation secured lending business operation into Maravedi. Initially, this process is concerned only with Hi-Fi Corporation's South African operations.

While the products distributed by means of the Traditional Retail footprint are complementary to the financial services offerings of the Financial Services division, the product portfolio is also accessible by customers external to the customer base of JD Group.

Product and channel development will continue to be the focus of the division. Furthermore, operating model development will be pursued with the objective of further increasing the competitiveness of the division.