Mobile company Monitise is to recieve £49.2 million in aggregate investment from Santander, Telefónica and MasterCard. In addition to this announcement, IBM has agreed to deploy its Watson computing engine in support of Monitise’s new tech platform.
Following this announcement, Monitise shares increased more than 10% on the London Stock Exchange. This is welcome news to the company, following recent reports that Visa was considering selling its stake in the company following a full-year Ebitda loss of £31.4 million.
The investment will be used for buisness development, with Monitise planning to build new Mobile Money capabilities for Santander. In addition to this, Monitise will work in co-operation with Telefónica on two country roll-outs in Latin-America during 2015.
Monitise will join Mastercard on a joint development and deployment of new digital payments services. These include cross-border mobile remittance capabilities, mobile transfer solutions and cloud-based payments services for businesses globally.
Monitise’s alliance with IBM will see the deployment of Watson, IBM’s cognitive computing and machine-learning technology. This will serve to augment the Monitise platform.
Monitise co-CEO Alastair Lukies commented: "The Mobile Money industry is now a global phenomenon. In developed markets it is fundamentally changing the way we bank, pay and buy. In emerging markets it is the foundation of new economic systems."
"There are two clear and distinct approaches appearing in this industry: disruptors looking for control and collaborators working together to share in a very big and sustainable opportunity."
"With our partners, we are delighted to be playing our role as an enabler to the Mobile Money collaborators. Via deepening partnerships, our increasingly connected mobile commerce services can become even smarter and more engaging for the businesses we work with."
Elizabeth Buse, Monitise co-CEO, said: "In order to succeed, organisations increasingly realise that partnerships without frontiers are critical to enabling them to engage with and serve their customers in an evolving digitally-connected world."
"Our approach to open collaboration across industries supports this by simplifying access to a common mobile network for partners via our cost-effective, subscription-based, flexible technology products and services."
"The next phase of our strategy sees Monitise, in collaboration with its partners, accelerating on its strategy to be the world’s leading enabler of digital commerce services."
