Yoyo, Hard Yaka Set Up $30 Million Mobile Payments Partnership

We’ve heard a little about the Yoyo Wallet system for a while now, and it’s a platform that does seem to have been engaging in some exciting growth patterns. In fact, new reports emerged that Yoyo recently established a new partnership with another mobile payments presence, Coinbase investor Hard Yaka, who laid $30 million into Yoyo’s operations.

The combined effort gives Yoyo a big slug of cash, and gives Hard Yaka access to Yoyo’s “omnichannel commerce API.” The application programming interface (API) will subsequently be built into Hard Yaka’s Global iD system, a user identification platform that works worldwide. It’s set to be part of a larger overall effort that allows Hard Yaka to make a “token of identity”, that can be connected to unique names and used as a means to prove identity.

Being able to generate and keep such proof close at hand will help speed up ecommerce operations, reports note, allowing for secure payment for goods and services, and more rapidly than under previous methods.

Given that the Yoyo platform is already delivering a lot of value to mobile payments and loyalty operations—reports noted that Yoyo processes over two million transactions a month, with over 600,000 monthly active users and over 1.25 million users overall.

Yoyo CEO Michael Rolph noted “We are building next generation commerce infrastructure that redefines the buying experience for a technology and data driven world. Our deep collaboration with HardYaka supports the fact that we are doing the right thing at the right time to help retailers be more like Amazon.”

Improving authentication technology should ultimately serve two purposes. One, it should make mobile payments and ecommerce operations faster for businesses and consumers to deal with. That improves customer experience and helps improve the chances of repeat business later. Two, it should also make these operations safer, which also improves customer experience but also helps businesses from having to launch into face-saving measures after a data breach hits. Since data breaches are so common these days, being ready for one in advance is just good business.

Hopefully the Hard Yaka / Yoyo partnership will work out for all concerned. It’s certainly worked out well for Yoyo, but only time will tell if everyone else benefits so richly.