Spindle Closes Yowza!! Deal Combining M-Payments with Couponing (Jan. 6, 2014)
Mobile payments tech company Spindle Inc. today announced it’s closed a deal to buy Yowza!!, a Los Angeles-based mobile couponing platform, adding some scale to Spindle’s service. The deal will bring Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Spindle’s total consumer base to 2 million iOS and Android users, plus 95,000 merchant relationships from the existing 3-year-old Yowza!! mobile coupon operation. Spindle plans to integrate Yowza!! with its own mobile commerce network and MeNetwork, a Denver-based mobile marketing service Spindle purchased last year for $10.8 million, to create a single service combining mobile couponing, loyalty and payments under the Yowza!! brand, according to an announcement.
Spindle is going after the nation’s small to midsize merchants, pushing to offer them new mobile payments and marketing technology alongside competition from diverse rivals, including LevelUp, Groupon Payments and startups like Clinkle, each scrambling to woo consumers and merchants with a unique approach.
“While some high-profile mobile payments operations like Isis are going after the big merchants, the smaller merchants we’re pursuing represent a huge universe of potential,” Bill Clark, Spindle’s CEO, tells Paybefore. With its latest acquisition, Spindle can notify consumers of real-time offers based on their physical location, while integrating merchants’ local and national coupons and the ability to accept card payments via mobile devices. And as a growing number of small merchants adopt cloud-based POS systems, accepting mobile payments from mobile devices via barcode readers and other technology is growing easier for small merchants no longer shackled to countertop POS hardware, Clark says.
