UK payments firm Helixion is liquidated
End of line
It’s not only the end of the working week but the end of the line for Edinburgh-based payments firm Helixion.
The company has gone into liquidation and intellectual property (IP) firm Metis Partners has been appointed to support the marketing and sale of its assets. On Metis’ website, it says the deadline for offers has been set at 28 June 2017.
Helixion had been losing money, as its most recent accounts filed, for 2015 to 30 September, reveal net current assets fell to £173,554, down from £422,724 the previous year. Its shareholder fund was no less comforting as at the end of 2015 it had decreased to £150,821 from £370,480 for the previous year.
Helixion was founded in 2002 for developing mobile application and encryption technologies. Since 2009, it specialised in contactless payments and had approximately 100 customers, notably Vodafone and Carta Worldwide.
The glorious dead
While the world of fintech is usually buzzing with start-ups, happy faces in expensive suits, and fountains of funding; there will always be casualties in the war for success.
As American humourist Will Rogers said: “We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”
In March, Plastc, a US start-up that created a card that could digitally hold 20 credit or debit cards, filed for bankruptcy. The company was set up in 2014 and had raised over $9 million through pre-orders.
In November last year, Berlin-based payments start-up Cookies seemed to have crumbled and applied for insolvency. This drama was accentuated by some bust-ups between personnel. But, like the US cavalry riding to the rescue in some dire Hollywood B-movie, Swedish payments provider Klarna rumbled into action to take on its tech assets and employees.
In April 2016, another UK-based payments firm, called Moni, went into receivership. It should not be confused with MONI. The latter has a registered office in Gibraltar. It is still doing business and is active on social media.
Finally, and my word this has been a very final report, in March 2016, QTS, a UK-based digital banking systems provider, called it quits. Based on Companies House data (the UK’s registrar of companies), QTS’s accounts were long overdue and it entered liquidation.
Look on the bright side, we all die in the end.
