Deloitte, which was appointed as  joint administrators to Powa Technologies Group on 22nd February, has announced that 74 people from the beleaguered company’s UK head office have been made redundant.

The firm, which was appointed as joint administrators last month – said that it would “continue to search for a buyer for all or parts of the business”, but “regrettably it has not been possible to continue running the company at its current capacity”.

Problems at the mobile payments firm came to a head in January when reports emerged that it wasn’t able to pay all its staff when new funding streams could not be agreed. Shortly after its biggest investor, Wellington Management, called in its outstanding loans and Deloitte were appointed. According to reports from the Financial Times, lawyers acting for the administrators have asked ex-Powa employees to avoid sharing any intellectual property with its former management.

The company, valued at over £1.8 billion, was announcing new contracts as recently as January 2016 but Business Insider reported that many of its 1,800 clients had actually failed to sign contracts.

Powa Technologies was founded in 2007 by ecommerce entrepreneur Dan Wagner and its head office is at Heron Tower in the City of London. It had three main produce lines: PowaWeb, which built online shops for retailers; PowaPOS, which built a mobile card reader to rival the likes of Square; and PowaTag, an app the would let consumers buy things by scanning QR code, print adverts, and audio of TV ads. A recent release about a deal with The Otto Group described PowaTag as “a future-proof and multi-dimensional platform that is capable of adapting to changing consumer habits.” The most recent solution used visual recognition technology, which allows consumers to go from hovering their smartphone camera over printed material to a completed purchase within a few seconds, all using pre-saved transaction data.