“We've started with the launches in Greece and Germany and plan to expand the service worldwide,” Viber added in a LinkedIn post. Last week Viber’s CEO Ofir Eyal announced the launch of Viber Pay in an interview with TechCrunch, telling the publication that Viber Pay’s first market would be Greece, a “purple country” (the colour of Viber’s app) where 91 per cent of smartphones have Viber installed. Viber is one of Europe’s largest messaging apps, with around 250m monthly active users, and is a subsidiary of Rakuten, the eCommerce and online retailing group listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange at an $8bn valuation. Indeed, on Twitter VibePay customers had already started reaching out to the CEO in confusion over the Viber Pay brand, with “Viber has made it pretty clear that they want to bring the product to the UK, we just think there's clear confusion for the end consumer,” Massie told AltFi. VibePay has also filed an application to have Viber’s “Viber Pay” trademark (filed prior to Viber Pay’s launch in 2021) be invalidated by the EU’s Intellectual Property Office due to the similarities with its own trademark. In the letter, seen by AltFi, VibePay’s lawyers wrote that the use of Viber Pay as a brand would “risk confusing and misleading the public into believing that the services supplied by your client are from, associated with, authorised by, or endorsed by, our client, when they are not.” On Sunday Massie’s lawyers sent a cease and desist to Rakuten’s messaging app Viber just days after its launch of payments in Europe under the Viber Pay brand. Less than a year after VibePay CEO and founder Luke Massie defended his fintech’s brand against Klarna, now Massie is on the defensive once again, this time against $8bn Japanese conglomerate Rakuten.
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