SumUp, one of the myriad European Square-style mobile card reader startups, has expanded its coverage footprint by rolling into an 11th European market: Russia. SumUp is now operational in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium and Russia, giving it a larger geographical footprint than other European rivals including iZettle and Payleven. → Read More
Some more consolidation afoot in the worlds of mobile marketing and mobile payments: Payvia, one of the many startups working in the area of carrier-based mobile billing, is buying Mogreet, a mobile marketing company that delivers campaigns via text, video and picture messaging services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed — although we have contacted the company to ask. Payvia says that the… → Read More
Telefonica is today announcing a deal with Samsung that will see it make an even bigger move into the area of carrier billing. Samsung will integrate the carrier’s billing backend directly into its own mobile services, meaning that the Telefonica customers (it has 316 million worldwide) who use the Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps portals on Samsung smartphones will be able to buy apps, music, videos… → Read More
Flying under the radar amid a flurry of announcements from today’s Google I/O developer conference is the bigger news of how Google is stepping up its efforts to compete with online payment giants, such as PayPal. It plans to do so with a revamped checkout process for the web, mobile web, within mobile applications running on Android, and more.
It’s a proposed death to PayPal by a thousand… → Read More
PayPal today announced Cash for Registers to encourage merchants to switch to PayPal-powered point-of-sale solutions. The program is part of the payment giant’s bid to be the kingpin among local merchants looking for lower-cost ways of accepting credit card payments. The announcement comes on the same day that Square launched Stand to complement its Square register product on iPad tablets and… → Read More
Groupon is once again expanding its portfolio of mobile payment services, putting it in closer competition with the likes of Square and PayPal’s here targeting local merchants: today it has released Groupon POS, which appears to be an iPad-specific version of its mobile payments service aimed at local merchants, working as a dashboard to make and track payments. → Read More
Most people may not yet be using smartphones to pay for goods when they are out shopping, but that doesn’t mean that they are not glued to their handsets anyway. Some research out today from Google indicates that among smartphone owners, some 79% can be classified as “mobile shoppers,” using their devices for some aspect of the shopping experience, from finding store locations through to finding… → Read More
New York City-based startup Cover seeks to simplify the process through the magic of mobile payments. It plans to do so with a payments platform and mobile application that would reduce all the fuss and calculations that happen when the check comes. → Read More
SumUp, one of the many European mobile card reader startups targeting small businesses — and taking advantage of Square’s continued absence to acquire users and build out a business — has taken another step designed to expand its reach by announcing a partnership with Revel Systems, a maker of iPad POS software. → Read More
A new patent published by the USPTO today (via PhoneArena) indicates that Amazon is looking into a way to limit the amount of data exchanged when two parties engage in a mobile payment transaction. The patent describes a way to sub in unique identifiers for information like name and email address that would otherwise be used to verify the identities of buyer and seller. → Read More
There is no single mobile payment company in Europe that has reached the scale and stature that Square has in the U.S., where the Jack Dorsey-led startup processed $1 billion in transactions in 2012. Payleven, one of the many mobile payment startups that want to take that crown on the other side of the pond, is today announcing two more steps in its strategy to convince businesses and consumers to… → Read More
The mobile payment market in Europe continues to get more crowded, with the latest wave of entrants coming from across the pond to join a number of homegrown startups targeting the millions of businesses in the region that still do not accept credit card payments. Today, Intuit opened up its mobile device-based card payment service, Intuit Pay, for general availability in the UK – just a few… → Read More
iZettle, one of the many mobile payment companies vying for the title of the “Square of Europe,” is taking one more step to cover the market ahead of U.S. rivals like PayPal’s here and Intuit’s European commercial launches. Today, iZettle chalked up its first full API partner in the UK, the appointment platform BookingBug. First announced last June, the API effectively makes the company’s mobile… → Read More
Visa believes that by 2020 more than half of all payments made in Europe will be done through mobile devices, so it is continuing to put more investment into how it will remain a central part of those transactions. In the latest development, mobile money specialist Monitise has announced an extended deal in which Visa Europe will license all of Monitise’s technology in an agreement it says will… → Read More
In spite of the fact that we now use smartphones to do just about everything, a winner has yet to emerge in the mobile payments space. Unlike mobile photo and video, consumers have yet to get fully comfortable with the idea of turning their phone into a mobile wallet. However, considering that just about every carrier, credit card company and software giant (like Google) is in the process of… → Read More
It was just this past May that MasterCard expanded its stake in the digital payments arena with its PayPass Wallet Services, and it’s already getting a bit of an overhaul. Today, MasterCard has announced that PayPass Wallet Services is graduating from its production trial with a new name — MasterPass — and a slightly broader approach to how it aims to improve users’ shopping experiences. → Read More
Make way for one more player in the European mobile payments space, and a big one at that. Today, the online payments giant PayPal announced that from this summer it will be rolling out PayPal Here in the UK, its first foray into the European market, equipped with a new piece of hardware to accomodate the chip-based cards prevalent in this part of the world. → Read More
Fortumo — a specialist in mobile carrier billing, which lets users to pay for apps and goods in apps without coughing up credit card numbers — is today raising its game a bit against competitors like Bango (partner to Facebook, Amazon and more), Boku and PayPal’s Zong — the Estonian-hatched startup has announced a new growth round — which TechCrunch understands to be in the region of $10… → Read More
A double-dose of details today about the normally secretive e-commerce startups incubated by the Samwer bothers-backed Rocket Internet. Silvio Berlusconi was outed as one of the key investors in Square clone Payleven; and Zalando, inspired by Zappos in the U.S., is reporting 2012 net sales of €1.15 billion and reaching breakeven in its core markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. → Read More
Mobile payments company Bango — provider of carrier billing services to the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Telefonica, Google, Blackberry, Opera and more — doubled down on its emerging market strategy. The publicly-traded company announced today that it has raised £6.5 million ($10.2 million) through a placing of 3,250,000 new ordinary shares on the London Stock Exchange at 200 pence per share… → Read More
Payleven, the mobile payment company from the Samwer bothers’ Rocket Internet incubator, is now taking orders for its chip-and-PIN readers, which it says makes it one of the first of the Square-style competitors in Europe to offer quick way to comply with Visa’s card payment requirements in the region. The readers were first announced in October 2012; today Payleven starts to take orders — at a… → Read More
Competition and activity continues to heat up in the mobile payments market. UK-based mPowa — a mobile payments provider that, like Square and others, provides a dongle that merchants can attach to a mobile device to process card payments — has signed a white-label deal with Portugal Telecom for the carrier to resell mPowa’s services as the centerpiece of its own mobile payments solution. The… → Read More
Editor’s note: Maria Rocio Paniagua currently works as a project manager at Innku, one of the top mobile and web workshops in Mexico.
Mobile penetration in the Mexican market is currently at 90+ percent, according to research firm Our Mobile Planet. Smartphone penetration is 20 percent. They made some wild forecasts about how they expect it to rise to 70 percent by 2015 — wild because the… → Read More
Some consolidation in the world of mobile payments and mobile banking: mFoundry is getting acquired by FIS for $120 million. FIS — a banking and payment provider that works with some 14,000 banks worldwide — already had a 22% stake in the company; today’s deal will see it paying for the remaining 78% in cash. mFoundry provides mobile banking and mobile payment solutions to some 850 banks and… → Read More
Yesterday Intuit took a step into social commerce with the acquisition of the team, technology and patents of social payments startup Payvment. Today, it’s revealing more about how it plans to expand its services into new areas to complement its bread-and-butter business of payrolls and accounting software, with over 20 new products. They include those in payments technologies using NFC and… → Read More
Long-time investor and Valley executive Keith Rabois is leaving his chief operating officer position at payment company Square, according to a surprise announcement by the company tonight. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar will be acting COO while it looks for a replacement. → Read More
The mobile payments space gets a lot of attention, especially as it seems that a new startup or financial institution launches “a new way to pay, issue rewards or power transactions from a mobile phone” every second, to borrow Leena’s words. Yet, while this “fustercluck” draws most of the headlines, there’s an equally large opportunity on the slightly-less-crowded side of the “mobile payments”… → Read More
Payleven, the Rocket Internet-incubated mobile-payment service that uses a dongle attached to a mobile device to make and process card transactions — yes, like Square — is today announcing that it has picked up another round of funding, as well as a new investor. As has been the case with many past investments in Samwer-incubated startups, neither the exact funding figure, nor the investor, have… → Read More
Mobile payments company Bango — partner to Facebook, Amazon, BlackBerry and others to enable app and content charges directly to your mobile phone bill — has announced another major carrier partner: Telefonica is enabling Bango payments via its payment API. → Read More
Forrester is predicting big growth for the mobile payments market in a new report out today, spanning 2013 to 2017. The market research firm is anticipating that the U.S. mobile payment market will see $90 billion spent in 2017, an incredible 48 percent compounded annual growth rate over the $12.8 billion that was spent in 2012. → Read More
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