Mobile Banking

The LUUP public relations function has been quite busy during the last few days. We have been exposed to two very powerful (and somewhat conflicting) messages within days from each other:

• The first message started hitting the media during the early part of this week (read here). "LUUP is dumping customers" one heading read. We were all interested (and shocked) that LUUP has closed their operations in the UK, Germany and Norway and not gradually or in a calm way. No, the message was something like: You have a month to move your money. After that no more LUUP service.
  
• The the second message with a very positive spin: Deutche Bank is embarking on a massive project and have selected LUUP as their partner to do this. Congratulations! Phew, for a moment there we thought that LUUP was in difficulty.
  

Then I started wondering: why, if you have just closed this big deal with such a major bank, why then immediately (with obvious urgency) close down your own operations? And if you have to do that, why not wait a month or two before starting to do this? What could the reason be for this urgency? Did Deutche Bank demand this as part of the deal? Does LUUP have limited resources and must now get everyone to focus on the German opportunity? Or was this just bad PR planning? Why is it that Deutche Bank did not do this selection on a RFP basis? Did they consider other solution providers?

Or as one blogging site commented: ("LUUP no longer needs their customers"). We will probably never know.

Unknown said...

As early UK LUUP users, myself, my family and a few friends used LUUP sucessfully for a brief period after launch.

Suddenly for no reason, several of our accounts that we had achieved "sign up" credits were frozen, though at the time no reasonable explanation was given.

We found we were unable to withdraw the earned promotional deposits and on following through on those earlier frozen accounts we are unable to reclaim orour long outstanding balances.

On querying the closure process which indicates incorrectly that the accounts have been frozen due to 3 wrong attempts to access the account one receives an e-mail referring to a tortuous process involving sending notarised documentation to one of their non UK offices.

Clearly they are not keen to hand back the funds.

Draw your own conclusions!

4:58 PM