Semble, a New Zealand mobile wallet company, has today announced that following a strategic review of the business it will discontinue its current mobile payment service.
CEO Rob Ellis says that Semble remains committed to bringing innovation to its mobile wallet platform and will refocus the business to develop and build new services.
“Mobile payment services haven’t had the speed of uptake and usage we expected due to a variety of reasons. These include low levels of consumer awareness of mobile payments and relatively low volumes of contactless terminals, especially outside the major retail brands, although contactless transactions in general are growing,” Rob said.
Semble and its key stakeholders, 2degrees, Spark, Vodafone, ASB and BNZ jointly undertook the review and mutually agreed to discontinue Semble’s current payment service offering.
While this is disappointing for all parties, Semble will continue to operate as a business and Semble and its partners remain excited about the future and what’s to come. Payments were envisaged to be one of many mobile wallet services, and the company is now preparing for the next phase of product development and growth.
“We’ve learned a great deal over the past couple of years, technology has evolved and we’re currently planning to extend our capability to include a more flexible, modular and future proofed technology platform which offers kiwi businesses easy integration into their own and third party mobile apps to deliver a range of wallet services,” Rob said. “We’ll share specific developments as they come about.”
As a result of the decision to discontinue mobile payment services, the “Snapper in Semble” service will not be available to new customers, although existing customers will be able to keep using the Snapper functionality on their phones for the foreseeable future. Semble and Snapper are in discussions about offering Snapper services via Semble again in the future for new customers.