MCX Postpones Rollout of CurrentC ⇥ techcrunch.com

A year and a half after its debut, CurrentC still hasn’t see a proper launch. And, as Ingrid Lunden reports for TechCrunch, it’s unlikely to do so in the future:

Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) today announced it would postpone a nationwide rollout of CurrentC, a smartphone payment initiative originally conceived as a mobile wallet rival to smartphone-led services like Apple Pay and Android Pay. As a result, MCX said it would lay off 30 people as it shifted its focus to working with financial institutions.

So far, CurrentC was deployed to just nine retailers in Columbus, Ohio.

The accompanying statement from the CEO of MCX Brian Mooney was squirrelly enough to get a fresh PR-speak translation from John Gruber:

Utilizing unique feedback from the marketplace and our Columbus pilot, MCX has made a decision to concentrate more heavily in the immediate term on other aspects of our business including working with financial institutions, like our partnership with Chase, to enable and scale mobile payment solutions.

CurrentC is a complete and utter failure.

In a nut, yeah.