Mobile money company Monitise suffered a huge blow this week as Visa Europe revealed its plans to sell its 5.3 per cent stake in the struggling company.
The revelation of the plans to sell the stake come mere days after Monitise issued its fourth revenue warning since last year.
The news sent Monitise shares plummeting down to 18 per cent in early trading, whilst the company’s stock dropped more than 80 per cent in the past 12 months.
The mobile banking vendor said Visa Europe “will reduce its shareholding over time”, but in a statement said that the partnership would continue through till March 2016 under the terms of the existing deal. In that time the two companies plan to “work together on a number of projects… and will assess on an ongoing basis opportunities to work together in future.”
Once a highly promising and lauded presence on the FinTech scene, recent years have been unkind to the company as it saw steep drops in revenue and expects this year’s revenues to be between £88 and £90m rather than the originally forecasted £90m – £100m.
Visa Europe’s old owner, Visa Inc. also had a stake, but that was sold last year. The American payments provider cited the then new arrival of Apple Pay as being one of the key factors, saying Monitise would struggle to compete with it.
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