New Netherlands mobile wallet on the block

Payments is one of the most crowded industries around right now and while there are signs of consolidation in some parts of the industry such as point of sale, others are likely to get busier before there is a shake out.

Enter Europe’s latest digital wallet. This one is called GRPPY and it’s been launched by Germany’s Wirecard and mobile loyalty and payments firm MyOrder launched eight years ago and snapped up by Dutch banking and financial services firm Rabobank in2012.

Available in the Netherlands, this is aimed at group purchases and helping to eliminate the hassle of paying friends back for things like tickets, dinner or household purchases among flatmates. It looks to tap into a very real and annoying problem that services like Venmo are solving with great success in the US.

This app goes for a different kind of approach – letting one person collect money from multiple people and then pay for, say a holiday apartment. Rather than one person fronting the money and then requesting money say like on Circle, the idea seems to be around group tabs, with members in a group depositing money via iDEAL (the Netherlands’ online banking and payments system).

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