Keyloop has expanded its sales team in South Africa to strengthen its presence in the region. As the new Regional Sales Director for Keyloop in sub-Saharan Africa, Tantia Kruger will take the reins locally, focusing on nurturing existing customer relationships and working with customers to understand their individual business challenges and deliver the best solutions.

Tantia will be working closely with Graham Stokes, Vice President for Europe and Africa, who brings more than 20 years of experience in the automotive software and data space, with a strong track record of leading regional teams and delivering commercial growth. He oversees Keyloop’s commercial strategy across Europe and Africa, including the company’s operations in South Africa.

Tantia comments: "Keyloop provides a suite of solutions to serve the entire end-to-end motor retail ecosystem, with proven, global success. South Africa represents a dynamic market and, by implementing Keyloop’s strategy and vision, dealers can unlock opportunities to drive efficiency and harness the power of data across the region. To support this, we are investing in the South African market and increasing our client focus by growing our sales team from two to five people."

Graham highlights that this investment in people reflects Keyloop’s long-term commitment to the South African market. "South Africa plays a strategically important role in our regional footprint. Expanding the sales team and strengthening our local presence ensure that our customers benefit from the full scale of Keyloop’s capabilities," he says.

Tantia adds: "Having a dedicated team on the ground to service our OEMs, retailers, financiers and fleet suppliers is a focused investment but one that looks to the imminent and long-term growth within the region.

"Keyloop’s focus is on changing the experience people have in the automotive retail space, which needs to be more positive and more personal. That's what our products are offering. We designed our product suite to address the changing industry, while ensuring our customers see us as a partner to success."

Tantia tells Dealerfloor that she wants to ensure they can deliver future-proof solutions locally at the scale and pace required for South Africa to be more in line with international markets. "We recognise that we need to be the trusted adviser at a local level, while offering guidance in terms of what global best practice looks like."

According to Graham, involving South African dealers and OEMs more directly in Keyloop’s global innovation strategy is a key objective. "As we continue to roll out new solutions globally, it is important that our South African customers benefit early and can adopt technology that delivers real operational value.

"We are expanding our Dealer Management System capabilities and are no longer focused solely on traditional offerings. Increasingly, it's about offering Fusion, a comprehensive automotive retail platform that moves beyond basic DMS development and harnesses a unified data model to streamline key processes."

Fusion is the industry’s first fully connected automotive retail platform (ARP). Increasing customer and vehicle lifetime value, Fusion optimises the sales and aftersales process to deliver a seamless customer experience, with its extensive capabilities organised into four domains. ‘Demand’ enhances the customer experience by providing personalised and intelligent acquisition, conversion and retention tools. ‘Supply’ maximises vehicle profit from inventory to asset risk management. ‘Ownership’ optimises resource yield from aftersales to resource management, and ‘Operate’ helps retailers reach peak operational efficiency with unified data.

She adds that the Fusion platform will be rolled out in South Africa in 2026. Scalability and agility are essential here. Using a ‘staircasing’ approach, we are building upon existing Keyloop Operate products in the market; we are now deploying our suite of APIs to enhance data and connectivity, bringing new solutions to market a lot quicker and enhancing our partner ecosystem.

Tantia previously worked for global organisations and local start-ups. She has over 20 years of experience in the services and software sectors across Africa, managing clients in the Automotive and Financial Services industries. She is passionate about coaching teams to deliver value through high-touch customer engagements and collaboration. Joining Keyloop was the perfect opportunity for Tantia to enter an engaging and evolving industry, focused on delivering software and first-class customer service.