The American mobile payments company, Bling Nation, has admitted that its business model has failed to lure in merchants. They are now rethinking their approach.
The company provide near-field communication (NFC) stickers which are put on mobile phones and then used to make contactless payments. In the early days things seemed to be going well, $30 million funding was raised and several smaller banks signed up, glad to have an alternative to the payment giants.
Late last year Bling introduced FanConnect and that was where things began to go wrong. FanConnect is a social-media based reward scheme which was compulsory for their bank and merchant partners. Merchants began to ditch the service rather than adopt FanConnect.
They have now accepted they need to change and have shut down in order to rethink. Such a pause may prove costly, however, with mobile payments gaining momentum all the time.
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