flywallet6/22/2021

Flywallet successfully closes second round of seed financing.

Read: 4 min

TAS Group enters the capital of the company to accelerate the go-to-market of the wallet for contactless payments through Keyble wearable devices.

Milan, 22 June 2021 – Flywallet S.r.l. (“Flywallet”), the innovative startup that created the digital platform for enabling payments and services through wearable devices with biometric authentication, has signed an investment agreement reserved for the entry of Global Payment S.p.A. (“GP”), a subsidiary of TAS Tecnologia Avanzata dei Sistemi S.p.A. (“TAS”), into the capital of the company with a minority stake.

TAS is a multinational company, listed on the Milan Stock Exchange, whose payment software solutions are adopted by banks and central institutions throughout Europe, the United States and Latin America. More than 100 million payment cards are managed by TAS platforms worldwide. Thanks to its leadership, TAS will be a vehicle to accelerate the go-to-market for Flywallet mobile wallet, the world’s first for tokenizing payment cards on wearables with biometric authentication. The partnership will also result in a commercial agreement under which Global Payment S.p.A. will distribute Flywallet’s wearables and service platform to Tas Group’s business customers.

Flywallet’s flagship product is Keyble, a new type of wearable that adapts to the user’s lifestyle, created with eco-friendly materials and inspired by made-in-Italy fashion. It consists of a smart module that can be inserted into fashion accessories such as bracelets or watch straps and is equipped with biometric sensors for user authentication and to monitor their health.

Through fingerprint or heartbeat via ECG, the user can enable contactless payments in shops, passwordless login to online services, ticketing, loyalty cards, access to gyms, offices and homes, car door locks and digital identity. In early 2022, the wearable will be certified as a medical device capable to perform analysis of cardiac arrhythmias, blood oxygen saturation and body temperature.

Flywallet is proposing a unique “Biometric Wearable Platform as a Service” model for e-money and payment institutions, banks, insurance companies and businesses. By connecting via dedicated APIs, the Flywallet Platform allows Partner companies to deliver new types of digital services easily and securely through the proprietary wearables.

Valentino Bravi, CEO of TAS states: “At TAS, we have always applied the principles of “continuous innovation” to ensure the market a constant technological and functional evolution of our products and services, both through significant investments in R&D – more than 10% of our revenues in the last decade – and through the acquisition of innovative companies.

In 2019, for example, the acquisition of Mantica enabled us to expand our offerings in the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence areas.

Today, we are investing in Flywallet because we are convinced that offering wearable technology that is personalisable and adaptable to our customers’ user experiences is a critical success factor.

We are also pleased that this project gives us the opportunity to reaffirm our decades-long commitment to promoting Italian technology in a sector that will undoubtedly improve our lives and make them more secure in the years to come.”

Lorenzo Frollini, Founder and CEO of Flywallet says: “It is an honour for Flywallet to count TAS among its shareholders and partners. Between TAS and Flywallet there is a perfect strategic fit and a total sharing of the company’s core values, including customer centricity and a relentless pursuit of service quality. In the medium term, the strategic partnership with TAS will also allow Flywallet to expand its range of services through the opportunities offered by PSD2.”

***

TAS is a multinational company specialised in software solutions for e-money, payments, financial markets and systems for the Extended Enterprise, listed on the Italian Equities Market since May 2000 and leader in Italy in card management systems, access to payment networks and management of stock exchange orders.

TAS Group (the group of companies controlled by TAS) serves the most important commercial and central banks in Italy and Europe, the major financial services centres and some of the leading global broker dealers in the Fortune Global 500.  

Flywallet, founded by Lorenzo Frollini at the end of 2018 together with Arianna Ludovica Frollini, Matteo Egidi and Alessandro Massimiani, is the innovative startup that, through its digital platform, connects payment, mobility and health services into a single integrated ecosystem that puts security first, thanks to biometrics and proprietary wearable and IoT technologies.