Seamless May Be Ready to Drop or Sell Seqr

October 19, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

Part of any maturing market is the slowing of new entrants and the departure of older entrants who just can’t compete any longer. While we haven’t exactly seen a lot of slowdown in new entrants, we have seen some firms depart the market. One of the most recent incidents of departure comes from word about Seamless, who is at last report considering either selling or outright shuttering its Seqr service.

Basically, the reports suggest, the market isn’t particularly hospitable to Seqr right now, and so Seamless is looking to pull in its wings on some front. That front is business to consumer (B2C), which Seamless is out to throw over in favor of business to business (B2B), where “…traction is both strong and accelerating.”

If there’s no interest in a sale on Seqr, reports suggest that the product will simply engage in a “winding-down” instead. The reports also noted that, in a bid to both gather resources for B2B operations and fund the necessary exit costs of a B2C departure, the company is out to raise 100 million Swedish krona—about $12.27 million US as of this writing—via a “rights issue” launch.

Apparently, Seqr was a “highly cash consuming” operation, and Seamless is looking to throw that cash into support for MeaWallet instead, which is reportedly set to be in “…a clear profit making position during 2018.” That’s reason enough for anyone to make a switch.

What’s odd, though, is that Seqr is already pretty well-received. Reports from Seamless say that Seqr is available at over 30 million contactless card terminals, and that a combination of “low investment and transaction fees for merchants” make Seqr “…the most widely used mobile payment solution in Europe.”

Okay, so if that’s the case, why are they bugging out? Why is this operation both spectacularly well-received and a cash sink at the same time? And why is Seqr looking to get out of a field where it’s surprisingly popular? There seems to be quite a bit untold about this story, and if Seqr does just shut down instead of get sold, we may never know just what shut it down.