Giving card issuers a potential new venue to tap small business mobile payments at the point of sale by selling speed, Intuit this week is demonstrating new renovations its GoPayment mobile service to eliminate the card readers that merchants attach to their mobile devices to execute card payments.
By using NFC, card data would instead be transferred between a consumer and a business staffer’s mobile devices by touching the two devices together—transmitting card data via radio waves.
Presently, GoPayments’ participating merchants—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—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 new technology, which is built on Google’s Android mobile platform using Nexus S by Google, eliminates the need for this add-on card reader hardware. The new service is designed to shave a few more seconds off of 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 onto their 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 demo phase—Intuit showcased it at a Google developer conference on Tuesday and posted a demo video on its site—the firm is planning to make it a feature of GoPayment in the near future. Intuit did not respond to requests for comment by Tuesday evening.
Intuit is also planning to launch a version of GoPayment for the Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets that allows merchants to take photos of frequently sold items to create 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 later this summer.
Some financial institutions are also starting to adopt phone-to-phone mobile payments capabilities. ING Direct last week introduced a P2P application that allows consumers to send money to each other by bumping their iPhones together.
