Movo Successfully Lands $1.8 Million to Enter Mobile Payments Fray
It’s impressive that the mobile payments market really isn’t all that old yet, and it’s still generating new potential entrants in the field.
One such entrant, which recently concluded a seed funding round, is Movo, an Oakland, California firm which landed $1.8 million to take on this still-growing frontier.
Movo offers its users a Peer-to-Peer-to-Purchase (P2P2P) platform, which is sufficiently innovative that the term P2P2P is apparently trademarked, if reports are accurate.
The app developed as a result of all this funding should be available by the end of this year, and delivers a novel concept.
With this app, users not only get access to peer-to-peer payments capability, a chronically underserved market, but also get access to a bank account of sorts to offer a connection for merchants to use.
Essentially, it almost works in the same way cash itself does, only in a more versatile way, going from friends and family to being able to make a kind of digital prepaid card that works most anywhere a major credit card would be taken, so in physical stores, online, or in apps.
When I first heard about Movo I rolled my eyes into the next county and wondered what in the world this yet-another-mobile payment app could do that everyone else in the field hasn’t.
Hearing about the depths of P2P2P, though, changed my mind fairly quickly, and suggested that this could be a very big deal if all the kinks are worked out.
This is addressing a lot of the versatility and similar issues that are giving mobile payments users problems today. There’s one big problem to overcome, though, and it’s a matter of marketing.
Movo has to distinguish itself immediately from a whole lot of other systems out there that have been on app store shelves in years.
There’s a lot of inertia to break here, and while Movo definitely has the functionality to be a winner, it doesn’t have a user base, and a lot of users are already pretty happy with their current system of choice.
So Movo has to distinguish itself—which it has—and also break inertia, which is going to be a challenge. With its extra marketing dollars, it may be able to pull off a win, but it’s going to be quite a fight by any measure to get ahead here.