Tag: mobile transactions

Mobile payments for homeless magazine powered by iZettle

Vendors of the publication can now accept transactions over a smartphone or tablet.

iZettle, a Swedish company that provides social and mobile payments services, has now entered into a partnership with the magazine called Situation Sthlm, which is a publication that is sold in Stockholm by homeless people as a part of a program that provides them with the opportunity to earn money.

The transaction business is now working with the magazine company to help to make those sales easier.

iZettle announced that it will be working with the magazine by providing the sellers of the publication with smartphones and card readers. This will allow those sellers to be able to use mobile payments technology to accept payments on the spot, from the buyer’s credit or debit cards. No matter where the seller may be, as long as he or she has a cell phone signal, it will be possible to accept these digital transactions, instead of having to rely wholly on cash.

This agreement is the result of a successful mobile payments trial program that has now been completed.

Mobile Payments - iZettleThe trial using the mobile payments services ran for a full month through five sellers who were provided with smartphones and a card reader from iZettle. This gave them the ability to expand the acceptable transactions from cash to credit and debit, as well. To use the service, vendors simply plug the card reader into the smartphone. The customers could then swipe their cards and either sign on the device screen or use a PIN to be able to complete the purchase.

The smartphones that are used for the mobile payments program are collected – along with the card readers – from the central offices every day at the same time that the sellers obtain the magazines that they sell.

iZettle provides both the hardware and the mobile payments software in this agreement so that the sellers would be able to convert their tablets or smartphones into a type of credit and debit card terminal that works on the go. They also provide their services to other merchants and are compliant with EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and VISA) standards in addition to the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards).

Mobile payments future is becoming clearer

The last few weeks are proving to be a defining period for this type of transaction.

Over the last few weeks, the combination of the groundbreaking mobile payments announcements made from Money2020 in Las Vegas and from the GSMA’s NFC & Mobile Money Summit in New York have allowed a much clearer vision of the future of this technology to be formed.

The leaders of the industry giants are now revealing the next steps that their companies will take.

This has given the world the opportunity to see a much clearer vision of the future of mobile payments technology, with increasingly pervasive tech as well as a considerable cooperation from the industry. As was pointed out by the co-founder and CEO of Ensygnia (a visual pay technology), Richard H Harris, m-commerce venders and retailers alike will now be working to give consumers a better shopping experience overall.

This includes the development of mobile payments for everything from smartphones to wearable gadgets.

Mobile Payments FutureIt also involves the creation of new ways for people to order their products and services and to employ mobile payments through the establishment of identity and by “tokenizing the things we use for identity,” said Harris.

The Visa global head of digital for developed markets, Sam Shrauger, explained that he sees the tech within the retail environment becoming more omnipresent. He stated that by being able to work together, it will become possible to establish a “strong ecosystem” that will be both secure and safe because it gives consumers the opportunity to – for instance – walk into a restaurant and have their meal already prepared and sitting on the table for them. He explained that mobile payments and commerce are “all about taking friction out of every aspect of the shopping, buying, paying, post-transaction experience.”

The Groupon owned Breadcrumb restaurant point of sale system founder, Seth Harris, agreed with Shrauger’s statement that cooperation of this nature will broaden, as companies are well aware of how difficult it is to progress in this way when they are attempting to do so on their own. “I think we’re going to see a lot more cooperation among a lot of the big companies than people really realise. It’s only through us all working together that I think we’re going to get there fast.”

PayPal’s vice president of global solutions management, Carey Kolaja, pointed out that there has already been notable progress in mobile payments and loyalty systems over the last year and a half; that more distance has been travelled in that time than it has in the last decade.