Beem It, a little-used alternative to the New Payments Platform, has been bought by Eftpos.
Commonwealth Bank, NAB and Westpac are the vendors, the three banks having dreamed up Beem It three years ago. Amid factious governance, this banking trio made little headway with yet another app and digital wallet, one with seemingly few points of difference to the services on offer via the bank’s primary apps and the industry’s Osko payments service.
Eftpos CEO, Stephen Benton, yesterday said buying Beem It “was a logical move for Eftpos as a trusted Australian payments brand that has access to hundreds of thousands of Australian merchants, millions of consumers and is quickly moving into digital payments.
“We are very excited to complete this purchase as a key element to Eftpos’ strategy to diversify and move further into the digital ecosystem,” Benton said.
“In many countries, mobile wallets are the main app for day to day life, particularly throughout Asia and the Nordics. These apps make life easier and add value, seamlessly and securely,” he said.
Benton argued that “looking forward, Beem It, along with other eftpos assets such as its digital identity solution, connectID, could be utilised to create compelling innovations for consumers, merchants and banks to enhance digital commerce while leveraging existing industry investments.”
The Eftpos CEO also clarified: “eftpos the payment system will remain wallet agnostic and be the rails that support a variety of digital wallets.”
Eftpos has work ahead to reboot the Beem It app, the metrics for which mostly show an app sidelined by the 2020 boom in digital payments.
According to Eftpos, as at the end of August 2020, “there had been 1.4 million downloads of the Beem It App [and] hundreds of thousands of regular users.” Or not so regular.
It was as recently as mid-September that the Beem It blog could share news of this milestone: “We’ve hit the $1 billion mark in total transactions.”
The New Payments Platform, by contrast, now processes billions in payments each day, around 80 per cent of which are consumer to consumer payments, often under rival Osko brand.
Apple’s App Store rates the Beem It digital wallet as “#8 in Finance”.
While Eftpos sets out to clarify its strategic position in digital wallets, the company is simultaneously seeking to wrap up delicate negotiations to enable a 3-way merger of Eftpos, NPPA and BPay.
Banking Day reported last week that Australian Payments Council chair Robert Milliner has been appointed as the independent convener of a special industry committee tasked to establish a governance framework for “making non-binding recommendations” on the merits of merging NPP Australia’s operations with the two domestic payments schemes.