Twyp Calls it Quits in the Netherlands

A market as broad and varied as the mobile payments market features a whole lot of firms getting started. As we all know, however, not every firm that enters into a market will remain there forever, and recently, we saw a new casualty arise in a rather unexpected field.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payments operator Twyp recently buckled in the Netherlands, starting December 15.

Those who have cash in the Twyp app will need to withdraw it by December 15, as a result, and Twyp’s owners—Dutch banking concern ING—have suggested users move instead to the ING mobile banking app instead.

So what took down Twyp? Reports suggest it was a simple matter: a comparative lack of demand. The reports noted that customers said “they don’t need or want a separate app to make payments to friends.”

Those involved in Twyp considered the news of lack of interest “difficult to hear,” but relented and let go of the app, at least partially. Though it won’t be on hand in the Netherlands, it will remain operational in Spain. Apparently, as ING CEO Mohamed de Booij notes, “the market for mobile banking is different from the Dutch” in Spain.

This move shouldn’t hurt ING unduly; though it likely will lose at least some business, much of the business will likely transfer over to the ING mobile app without incident. Not everyone will, of course; chances are the Dutch customer base didn’t universally declare Twyp useless, and some would have likely stuck on that won’t be interested in moving to the full ING app, so this comparatively small slice of the market may be out of the game altogether.

It’s unusual that the Dutch should be so seemingly against a P2P payment structure. Though perhaps it’s not so much the idea of a P2P payment system as it is a dedicated app for P2P.

It would be easy to think that the Dutch users instead want an all-in-one system designed to address every point of a mobile payment system instead of a system that only addresses one. With so many choices out there, it stands to reason some wouldn’t last, and that’s just what we saw with Twyp.