Intuit Inc. plans to simplify its GoPayment mobile payment acceptance service by eliminating the need for its card reader attachment with certain phones.
Using near-field communication, card data would instead be transferred between a consumer and a business staffer's mobile devices by touching the two devices together.
Currently, Intuit's participating merchants attach a plastic swipe device to their mobile handset, which acts as a card reader. Merchants swipe consumers' cards through the card readers, and the funds are deposited in the merchant's bank account. The service executes about $19 million in transactions per week, mostly for small businesses that would be less likely to purchase enterprise point of sale contactless payment hardware.
Intuit's new technology, which is built on Google Inc.'s Android mobile platform using the Nexus S handset, eliminates the need for this add-on card reader hardware. The Nexus S, made by Samsung Electronics Ltd., has an NFC chip. At first this chip could only read signals, but Google issued a software update in February to enable two-way communication.
The new service is designed to shave a few more seconds off card-present transactions at smaller merchants by enabling consumers to pay without using physical credit cards — instead using a virtual card that the consumer has already loaded on to the mobile device.
Intuit is also developing NFC technology that would allow merchants to add items to their inventory by tapping their phone against a product with a smart tag (a Web-generated shipping label). Info from the smart tag would automatically port to the merchants' mobile payment application.
While the new technology was in the demo phase — Intuit showcased it at a Google developer conference on Tuesday and posted a demo video on its site — the company is planning to make it a feature of GoPayment in the near future.
Intuit did not respond to requests for comment.
Intuit is also planning to launch a version of GoPayment for Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets. The tablet version will allow merchants to take photos of frequently sold items to create a visual product list to take orders as well as use touch-screen capabilities to drag and drop items to complete sales quickly.
The tablet app is expected this summer. Some financial institutions are also starting to adopt phone-to-phone mobile payments capabilities.
ING Group NV's ING Direct on May 3 launched a person-to-person payment application that allows consumers to send money to each other by bumping their iPhones together.
