Five-year old UK payments app Droplet shuttered its service, citing a failure to reach scale.

“We always knew it would take significant investment to give Droplet the scale it would need to succeed,” wrote CEO Steffan Aquarone (pictured) on the company’s website.

Droplet 2He added that investors had supported the firm “through thick and thin” and that it had “tens of thousands of customers” as well as “hundreds of paying merchants,” both impressive metrics.

But he admitted Droplet never got big enough to be viable as a profit-making business.

Certainly, when Aquarone spoke to Mobile World Live in 2013, securing investment was a key theme.

Droplet enabled users to pay for goods at the point-of-sale, at first glance putting itself up against the likes of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

Latterly Droplet had offered users additional loyalty rewards as an encouragement, but clearly that was not sufficient to build a business.

The payments app ceased working from midnight on 15 July. Any remaining balances will be shortly returned to users.

The firm is seeking a buyer for the technology, support materials and know-how that it built up.