A few months back I posted a poll on LinkedIn to help us find an alternative name for the Open Payments Cloud. We had just acquired the assets from Open Payments Cloud Ltd, a subsidiary of Ixaris, and were deciding whether to continue with the brand. I confess that most voted to keep the Open Payments Cloud name, but in the end we figured we’d still go ahead and make the change.

Our technology is a direct output of the Open Payments Ecosystem (OPE) project that was possible thanks to funding from the EU Horizon2020 programme and the support of the project partners, including Visa, Locke Lord, IDT Finance, the University of Malta, and Startupbootcamp Fintech. While we acknowledge their contributions, we also wanted to break from its provenance as a research project.

In the last 6 months since we acquired the assets of the project from Ixaris, we’ve been working in a stealthish manner to launch – in a couple of months hence – an initial, small but useful application of the OPE technology (take a look at the prelaunch website https://www.weavr.io/ if you’re curious to see what that first application is). We also realised that while the OPE technology is powerful and ambitious in scope, we did not want to be constrained to take it to market in the way the OPE project originally envisaged. Open Payments Cloud, the name of the company originally set up to commercialize the OPE technology, sets expectations that are prescriptive (and rather grand), whereas we wanted a name that’s evocative of where we’re heading but not so definitive.

So, why pick Weavr?

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for ‘weave’ is a clue: “to make from a number of interconnected elements” while other dictionaries emphasize the aspect of insertion of a new element into a structure: “to introduce another element into a complex whole”.

Beyond the obvious dictionary meanings, there’s nuance too: Weavr moniker evokes craftsmanship which we felt was perfect for what we wanted to promote. Indeed, we want to dedicate Weavr to those who take diverse and tangled threads and turn them into something new, useful and – yes – beautiful. In our case, it just happens to be in the payments domain.

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