Mobile Payments Firm Receives Investment From Santander, Telefonica And Mastercard

Monitise has announced that Santander, Telefonica and MasterCard will be putting up a £49.2 million joint investment to help further the mobile payments company’s cause, and support the global rollout of its platform.

The money comes with good timing, as it patches things up following a wobble caused by Visa, which recently said it was re-evaluating its stake in the business.

Monitise said that the £49.2 million invested by the trio will land them 161 million new ordinary shares at the price of 30.5 pence per share, the closing price of the stock as of the end of yesterday. In total, the new shares represent 8.2 per cent of existing issued share capital.

Furthermore, Santander and Telefónica will be able to jointly nominate a single non-executive director to the company’s board.

Monitise also announced that IBM has agreed to deploy Watson in support of the company’s new platform. IBM already provides cloud-based mobile commerce solutions in a partnership with Monitise announced back in July (IBM Global Business Services).

Monitise co-CEO Elizabeth Buse commented: “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.”

Monitise is still on course for its predictions for this financial year, namely 25 per cent growth in revenue on the previous year.