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Bonking with Apple has POUNDED mobe operators' wallets

... into submission. Weve squeals, ditches payment plans

Weve, the bonk-tastic joint venture between EE, O2 and Vodafone to “create and accelerate the development of mobile marketing and wallet services in the UK”, has abandoned plans to launch a digital wallet.

This follow on the heels of having lost £25m, on revenues of £13m in its first year, doing the mobile marketing stuff – as well as the departure of boss David Sear, who has not been replaced.

The idea behind Weve, codenamed Project Oscar, was that it would bring together an operator-led NFC payments system through the stepping stones of first using the founders databases for direct marketing by mobile, then launching a mobile wallet and finally a pay-by-bonk ecosystem.

The belief was that the operators could use their marketing muscle to make sure that all the smartphones they shipped came with the Weve wallet and then to get the customers to use it. The founders seeded the venture with £38m.

Cracks in Weve's strategy widened last year. Weve's plan to have a single, integrated Weve wallet was modified to one where each operator was supposed to bring their own wallet to the party, and this happened at about the time O2 killed off its seven year old wallet project.

Vodafone recently announced that it will be launching its NFC payments system this autumn and EE has Cash on Tap (video), which it has just announced now works on London Underground (Android only).

The sad decline in bonking

NFC has struggled. At the start of the month NFC World broke the news that Barclays had closed its QuickTap payments programme which it had launched with Orange.

One of the reasons for the constant failure of NFC has been the interminable wars between the operators and financial institutions over where the secure element should be.

The operators want it in the SIM card using the Single Wire Protocol so they could take a cut from every transaction. The financial institutions want the secure element in the handset using Host Card Emulation.

The mobile payments world has hailed Apple Pay as the start of the mobile payments revolution, something which happens about as often as Voyager 1 “leaves the solar system”, but it could be the death of the technology. Apple Pay is (surprise!) an Apple-only system and doesn’t offer any way in for the operators. By depriving Weve and the US equivalent Softcard (formerly known as ISIS) of all iPhone users, it seems that joint operator plans to build mobile payment systems are, if not dead, certainly on their deathbeds.

Apple, meanwhile, is reported to be creaming off 0.15 per cent on all Apple Pay transactions.

It may well be that having spent the last seven years saying that “the next iPhone will have NFC” and wishing it were true, Apple Pay will be the thing that kills the technology.

A Weve spokesman told The Register: "We continue to believe there is a great deal of potential in mobile contactless payments." ®

A Weve promotional video

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