The mobile commerce space has seen another end of year deal between cloud platform mobile payments provider Mozido and CorFire, a mobile commerce start-up that is particularly strong on point of sale payments.
Mozido has taken a majority stake in Corfire, one big enough to merit changing the larger company’s name to Mozido Corfire Inc.
Before this latest deal Corfire was wholly owned by the IT services division of South Korea’s SK Group, SK C&C. SK has made several investments in US tech companies, and will continue to hold a minority stake in the company.
The terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but is reflective of similar deals in the market, the company said. TechCrunch noted that this could put the deal in the realm of hundreds of millions of dollars, echoing Adyen’s £250 million round of funding announced earlier this week.
“By adding its strength in NFC-enabled mobile wallets to Mozido’s extensive mobile financial services and retail marketing capabilities, we can now give merchants around the world access to a powerful mobile ecosystem that adds monetization features to mobile programs,” said Michael Liberty, founder and Chairman of Global Strategic Initiatives at Mozido, said in a statement. “CorFire has built a state-of-the-art technology platform for NFC-enabled payments, and this acquisition, in conjunction with our MoTEAFTM platform, makes Mozido the leader in NFC and cloud-based mobile payments.”
As well as NFC wallet, Corfire also offers new mobile wallet functionality with international and domestic remittances, P2P payments, mobile bill pay, and international and domestic airtime top up, delivered as white-label services.
Customers for Corfire’s solutions include large carriers like AT&T and Vodafone and some large retail chains. This customer base is a natural focus for Mozido’s own solutions, meaning that all of the smaller company’s operations will run as before. The newly-created company will have a reach of two billion users through six of the top 20 mobile carriers globally.
Mozido raised $185 million in October 2014 after raising $103 million in May. The company does dabble in the point-of sale business by powering Dairy Queen’s mobile commerce services. But these solutions will now complement its other mobile commerce products such as its loyalty services, coupons and mobile banking services.
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