This article is more than 1 year old

Firm with 80 per cent of UK mobile numbers fails to monetise them, sold to O2

Weve fails to generate workable tapcash fabric

Weve, the mobile marketing consortium of EE, O2 and Vodafone, is being sold to O2. The organisation, which was formed with £38m from its wealthy parents under the codename “Project Oscar” fought significant regulatory hurdles with the aim of building a common technology for mobile NFC payments.

Weve was launched at the end of 2012 with the remit to develop a mobile wallet and then grow the mobile payments side of the venture. In practice this meant harvesting the mobile phone numbers of 80 per cent of UK mobile phone users from its member networks' databases.

That service has recently been used by the Electoral Commission to encourage the youth vote, but in general Weve has not been a commercial success. Last year the Financial Times (£) found that the business made a loss of £25m on revenues of £13m.

The plan to launch a mobile payments platform was slowly ramped down, with Weve saying that rather than develop a common wallet it expected its member operators to bring their own.

This was then followed by Weve dropping all moves into mobile money, abandoning NFC. In June last year CEO David Sear stepped down to join mobile payment company Skrill and was not subsequently replaced, with a part-time interim CEO keeping a hand on the tiller.

With the steady decline of Weve it’s no surprise that it has followed its US equivalent, originally known as ISIS and then as Softcard, into the sunset. It is, however, a little surprising that O2 should be the new owner since O2 is itself being bought by Three, which was the only network not to participate in the original joint venture.

A Weve spokesman sent El Reg a canned quote from digital director David Plumb: "By bringing Weve in house we will be making it bigger with an additional 20million opt ins through O2 Wifi and Priority. With more data sets and richer analytics, it will be better and with only one owner to answer to, it will be faster. Through this acquisition we will be able to offer our business customers the platform to offer their customers more personal and contextually relevant offers.”"

Softcard for its part was bought by Google – one of the companies which fought against Project Oscar’s EU approval – and then wound up. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like