Apparently, Fiserv’s decision to embrace CashEdge’s Popmoney brand name for its peer-to-peer payments service has its risks.
In a meeting with Fiserv officials this week, they were clearly concerned about the name, which they chose over Fiserv’s own homegrown ZashPay. When the discussion turned to the Popmoney brand, the Fiserv officials made it clear that they were not to call it “Pop,” only “Popmoney.”
To review, Fiserv purchased CashEdge last fall, giving it access to the Popmoney product and brand.
It seems there is a bit of a trademark issue with “Pop.” Indeed, Capital One Financial Corp. had the trademark for “Pop,” although that mark appears to have been abandoned in mid-2009. What is more striking is that CashEdge itself filed for the trademark for “Pop” in 2010, and that mark was granted to the company late last year (serial number 85171948).
The problem, however, appears to be a company called DPE Label Holding Corp. in Brooklyn, N.Y. DPE filed for a trademark of “pop” just a few days before CashEdge, and DPE’s application remains live (serial number 85490360).
I’m no lawyer, but it seems like DPE plays the trademark game, and that’s enough to forbid the word “pop” from Fiserv’s halls.
Isn’t this crazy? Who would have thought that a huge bank almost failing but for intervention by the FDIC who brokered the deal with Citi would start a bit of a bidding war of sorts? And now Citi is throwing around threats of tortious interference to protect their enviable position. If they were arm twisted into buying Wach anyway, why wouldn’t they breath a sigh of relief that WF wants to take it off their hands?
The only thing I can think of is that Wells Fargo has a huge insurance division as does Wachovia. But supposedly, the Wachovia Insurance division was not part of the assets that Citi was going to buy. Can anyone tell yet whether the WF deal includes the Wachovia Insurance division?
Or what if there was some really sweet federal deal that would have benefited Citi for taking the pariah that was Wachovia off the FDIC watch list? I am getting just cynical enough that I think this might be a possibility. Not black helicopter stuff, but some tax deal or something.
This will be interesting to see how it all fleshes out.
Tim