Semble, a New Zealand joint venture involving banks and telcos, today announced it will discontinue its current mobile-payment service following a strategic review of the business, according to company press release.

Semble CEO Rob Ellis said in a statement that the JV remains committed to bringing innovation to its mobile wallet platform and will refocus the business to develop and build new services.

"Mobile payment services haven't had the speed of uptake and usage we expected due to a variety of reasons. These include low levels of consumer awareness of mobile payments and relatively low volumes of contactless terminals, especially outside the major retail brands, although contactless transactions in general are growing," Ellis said. 

Semble and its key stakeholders, 2degrees, Spark, Vodafone, ASB and BN, jointly undertook the review and mutually agreed to discontinue Semble's current payment service offering. 

"We've learned a great deal over the past couple of years, technology has evolved and we're currently planning to extend our capability to include a more flexible, modular and future proofed technology platform which offers kiwi businesses easy integration into their own and third party mobile apps to deliver a range of wallet services," Ellis said. "We'll share specific developments as they come about." 

As a result of the decision to discontinue mobile payment services, the "Snapper in Semble" service will not be available to new customers, although existing customers will be able to keep using the Snapper functionality on their phones for the foreseeable future. Semble and Snapper are in discussions about offering Snapper services via Semble again in the future for new customers, according to the announcement.