Weavr to Close Its Recently Acquired Open Banking Payments App

London-based embedded finance provider Weavr has said it will close its open banking payments app, Comma.

The company acquired the app in March and will close it on Nov. 30, Tom Beckenham, the founder of Comma and currently the vice president of strategic opportunities at Weavr, said in a Friday (Sept. 29) blog post.

“We always believed that payments should be integrated into software, and we have now moved to becoming an API only solution,” Beckenham said in a Friday post on LinkedIn.

The decision to shut down Comma as a standalone product is part of Weavr’s strategy to leverage its open banking technology in its embedded finance offering.

Beckenham said in the LinkedIn post that many customers, especially those in the accounting sector, will be disappointed because they support the app. He added that Comma was the first payments app to fully embrace open banking and that it has advanced bulk payments technology.

“None of that is lost,” Beckenham said in the post. “The tech underneath will remain as part of the Weavr.io API offering. As sad as I am about this announcement, it’s a choice we had to make. We had to create the right focus so we can empower others to create payment products and features.”

The closure of Comma as a standalone app was expected, as Weavr focuses solely on embedded finance and does not directly cater to consumers, Tech.eu reported Monday (Oct. 2). Alex Mifsud, co-founder and CEO of Weavr, told Tech.eu that offering a standalone app without the capability to support end customers directly would be pointless. He acknowledged the difficulty of the decision, as it involved sacrificing revenues and losing satisfied customers.

Comma’s customer base consisted of a few hundred small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that used the app to connect with their accountancy systems for approving repeat payments, according to the report.

Weavr currently employs around 110 staff members, including approximately 15 individuals who worked on the Comma app, the report said. No job losses will occur as a result of the closure.

The company considered partnering with a third party to continue offering Comma as a standalone product, per the report. However, due to time constraints and contractual obligations with suppliers, this option was not feasible. Instead, Weavr plans to evolve Comma into an embedded finance solution that can be integrated into other software applications, providing similar functionality.

Embedded finance can enable businesses to integrate financial services into third-party applications seamlessly and efficiently, Mifsud told PYMNTS in an interview posted in March 2022.

“That gap between the banking APIs and what those companies need to do to be able to create this completely integrated experience and to do it in a way that is legitimate, [is] the problem that Weavr is solving,” Mifsud said.

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