Nucleus founded sQuid in 2005, inspired by operating the Oyster© customer portal between 2003-07. If you can pay for a ticket using contactless technology, why not use the same approach for payments, we thought?
We created the sQuid brand around its distinctive name, designed a disruptive business model and unique customer-facing technologies. We have subsequently guided sQuid to early maturity, transplanting a senior Nucleus management team, led by Adam Smith, into a subsidiary and then, over time, introducing additional investors to help fund its development.
sQuid’s start-up phase raised £8.5m in funding before merging with Applied Card Technologies in a £56m deal in April 2011 to create Smart Transactions Group, the UK leader in smart payments, ticketing and loyalty. STG then sold ACT to Fujitsu in 2015 to focus on growing sQuid in the UK, Africa and Asia. Nucleus remains the single largest shareholder in this group.
sQuid now delivers a range of smart transactions services on its end-to-end, bank-grade platform, where value can be loaded into customer wallets and spent at merchants or transferred to another account, without touching a bank.
After several years identifying suitable markets for this technology, sQuid now manages millions of transactions a week in UK schools and universities, attendance monitoring and payments in Kenyan and Nigerian schools and various humanitarian programmes across Africa.
www.squidcard.com
www.smarttransactionsgroup.com