Russian IT firm LANIT has invested $2,5 million in CardsMobile, a developer of contactless payment solutions, in exchange for a 28.6% stake, Russian business daily Vedomosti reported last week. Thus, the company has been valued at $8,7 million.
CardsMobile has developed a platform for NFC payments as well as a mobile application, christened ‘Wallet’ (‘koshelek’ in Russian). This app enables its users to issue a variety of virtual cards, these including bank cards and travel tickets, as well as discount and loyalty cards, using their smartphones.
So far, CardsMobile has issued 1,7 million virtual cards, with only 5% of them being bank cards. However, by the end of the year, the company expects to process no less than five million cards, which will increase the share of the bank cards, said Ksenia Rabinovich, a CardsMobile representative, in an exchange with the business daily.
CardsMobile company earned 70 million rubles (approximately $1 million at the current exchange rate) last year. Lanit’s cash injection investment will help CardsMobile scale the business and reach break-even, Rabinovich added.
While expecting to benefit from CardsMobile’s revenue generation capacity, Lanit vice president, Philippe Gens, hopes to sell Lanit’s stake as soon as the the startup will attract a strategic investor.
NFC gets traction
The issue of a NFC-powered bank card costs 90% less than the issue of a plastic card, and takes literally no time, notes Daria Yermolina of Tinkoff bank, a partner of CardsMobile.
NFC, which took its first steps in Russia in 2012, is now taking off. In late 2015, just 20% of the smartphones connected to MTS, a leading mobile operator, integrated this technology (up from 14% in 2014); but the proportion could jump to one third next year, according to MTS representative Dmitry Solodovnikov.
In 2017, contactless transactions in Russia will amount to 50 billion rubles (approximately $759 million at the current exchange rate), Solodovnikov believes.
Earlier this year, CardsMobile and British startup TediPay presented their first joint solution — a platform for wearables — at the Mobile World Congress exhibition in Barcelona.
In 2014, LANIT and Buran Venture Capital invested $2 million into Dashboard Systems, a Russian corporate software publisher.
Source: Vedomosti
