Industry veteran jumps ship to mobile operator payment venture
Sear is a well-known figure in the payments industry
Weve, the advertising and commerce joint venture between mobile network operators Vodafone, O2 and EE, has hired payments industry veteran David Sear as its permanent chief executive.
Sear replaces Nancy Cruickshank, who led the venture – formerly known as Project Oscar –through regulatory clearance by the European Commission as chief executive since September 2012. She will remain on board part-time until the end of March 2013 to ensure a smooth transition.
Sear has spent six years at Travelex, the world’s largest non-bank payments provider, as divisional managing director of its Global Business Payments and prior to that as divisional managing director of outsourcing. Before joining Travelex, Sear spent three years as commercial and scheme managing director at VocaLink, the UK payment processing operator.
Weve currently offers location-based video and SMS messaging and is developing a mobile wallet and voucher service for loyalty schemes that will offer businesses in the UK “a single point of contact and a single point of technical integration”. With the addition of Vodafone customers this week it has an opted-in database of 15 million customers.
