Well, it’s official. The mobile payment wallet experiment known as CurrentC through the retailer consortium MCX is coming to a close. The following message was sent to those individuals who participated in the Columbus, OH pilot:
Thank you for being an early tester of our CurrentC App! We hope you had a fantastic experience. We will be concluding our beta test and postponing further releases of CurrentC on June 28, 2016. Therefore, June 28th will be the last day that transactions will be accepted using CurrentC. Please stay tuned for updates on the future of CurrentC at www.currentc.com! If you have any questions or concerns, or wish to close your account, please contact us at customercare@currentc.com.
On June 28, 2016, all active accounts will be disabled and you will not be able to access your CurrentC account from the CurrentC app. For frequently asked questions, please see our website at www.currentc.com.
Some components of the platform will live on in the newly launched Walmart Pay currently in operation in Texas and Arkansas and perhaps other merchant wallets still under construction. One of the greatest lessons learned from this experiment is that retailers find the development of their own individual merchant wallets and control over the loyalty component to be much more practical. For more on the wrap-up of CurrentC, please see our Analyst Back and Forth Blog where we discuss the influence that CurrentC had on the wallet market.
Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group