Origami Pay

» see origami.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Origami Inc. was incorporated in February 2012 and spent its first years as a shopping app. The pivot that mattered came in May 2016, when the company turned the thing into a payment product: you held your phone up to a code sitting on a shop counter and the app settled against a card or a bank account. Nobody had to touch a terminal. In a country that still ran on cash at the counter, this was early.

Money followed. Over its life Origami raised a cumulative 8.8 billion yen, with KDDI and SoftBank Group on the cap table alongside Credit Saison. By the end it had signed a hundred and ninety thousand merchants. That number sounds large until you set it beside PayPay, which was carrying more than one million eight hundred and fifty thousand by January 2020, and which was a joint venture of the same SoftBank house that had put money into Origami in the first place.

On 23 January 2020 Merpay, the payments arm of Mercari, acquired all of Origami's shares. The release did not state a price, which Business Insider Japan noted was unusual for an acquisition by a listed company. Some of the coverage read the deal as the founder getting out cleanly. A person close to the company told that same publication the opposite: selling the business had been an agonizing decision.

~ the dossier ~

~ first mover ~

Being early in payments buys you a specific and limited thing. It buys you merchants who already have your sign on the counter and staff who already know the word for your product. It does not buy you the customer, because the customer will install whichever app is currently handing out money.

Origami's own framing was never really consumer-facing. Yasui described the product to the trade press as a platform that let retailers collect in-store data and use it for marketing. Whether retailers wanted that was not the question this market ended up deciding.

~ the cashback war ~

PayPay arrived at the end of 2018 with a promotion it called the ten billion yen giveaway, refunding a flat percentage of whatever you spent until the money was gone. LINE Pay answered it. Origami answered too, with discounts of its own, and the Japanese business press stopped describing the sector as a market and started describing it as a war of attrition.

This was not a product nobody wanted. It was a product in a market where the price of a customer had been set by somebody with more money than it had, and Origami had eight point eight billion yen raised across its entire life against a competitor whose opening promotion alone was ten billion. In early November 2019, at a fintech event in Hong Kong, Yasui was still telling reporters he would like to take the thing into other countries. The sale was announced eleven weeks later.

~ the paper crane ~

The wind-down ran in steps and every step is dated. New merchant applications closed on 31 January 2020, eight days after the acquisition, in a notice the archive still holds, which says plainly that the service would be folded into Merpay. Origami Wallet went on 13 February. The funds-transfer business was given up on the 25th and the remaining balances were refunded.

Then the two big ones, both at ten in the evening. On 28 April 2020 you could no longer register a card or pay with one. On 30 June 2020 the app stopped doing anything at all, including showing you your own receipts, though refunds stayed available for ninety days after a transaction as they always had. The website took longer to notice. In August, six weeks after the app died, origami.com was still greeting visitors with the line it had used for years, which was Hello, cashless. By November the page was down to two and a half kilobytes, holding a company profile and a page of policies.

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