Mobile Evolution said it has completed a pilot in which 100 mobile merchants, including cab drivers and trade-show vendors, accepted payment cards by keying the card numbers into cell phones, and is now unveiling the card-processing service to merchants nationwide.
The year-old company said its technology will allow any cellphone with a viewing screen to become a secure payment terminal. The product is designed for smaller merchants that handle less than $50,000 per terminal per year. The company uses Innovative Merchant Services, a unit of Intuit, to sponsor transactions into the card networks, and Global Payments Inc. to provide cardholder authentication for the cell-phone initiated transactions. When customers are ready to pay, merchants launch software in the phone and enter a PIN to access the payment application.
Once logged in, the merchant keys in the card data, sale amount and the customer's billing ZIP code for address verification against the card account. A summary of the transaction then appears on the phone screen.
