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Ireland’s banking industry has confirmed it is winding down plans to launch a mobile payments service due to a changing landscape.

Synch Payments, the Irish instant mobile account-to-account payments service, has announced that “following a careful and considered review of its business plan it has reached the difficult decision that it is no longer feasible to launch its payments app, Yippay, into the Irish market and Synch will cease operations”.

Synch was established in 2020 by some of Ireland’s leading banks with the intention of bringing a simple, industry-wide mobile instant payment service to the market for all payment types, based on an innovative digital solution.

According to a statement on the company’s website, a combination of factors has contributed to “an elongated timeframe” to launch, and this has rendered the original Synch proposition no longer viable.

Synch was backed by key Irish retail banks AIB, Bank of Ireland and Permanent TSB. The hope of stakeholders was to build a rival to Revolut, the British fintech that has become incredibly popular in the country. 

The project lacked the regulatory backing that other initiatives such as the European Payments Initiative in the EU have benefited from. 

In September, it was  in the Irish Times that the company was looking at ways to bypass authorisation with the Central Bank of Ireland. 

According to the company, it had been told it would need to apply for a licence as an account information service provider and as a payment initiation service provider. 

This sparked a change of business plan from the company so that it could find ways not to go through the authorisation process, adding delays to an already slow-moving project. 

The project showed hope last year. For example, it appointed seasoned payments leader Tim Fitzpatrick to be board chair and it was announced that part of the project will be delivered by Nexi, which has risen to become one of Europe’s largest fintech ventures. 

In June 2022, it also secured regulatory approval from the Irish Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), which had previously rejected its application.