PayPal today unveiled its new global payment platform for small and medium-sized businesses, PayPal Here. It brings the veteran payments solution into local stores with a new mobile app-card reader solution to rival Square. Rolling out to merchants today, it features a triangular card-reader, or dongle, that merchants can use to swipe cards of all varieties to start accepting mobile payments on-the-go — but all users need is their phones, via a startup named Card.io.
The startup, which unveiled its own consumer-facing app back in January, allows merchants to make the payment process as frictionless as possible. Available for both iPhone and Android, it provides mobile app developers a way to let consumers make purchases simply by holding the credit card up to the phone’s camera. As the company announced today on its blog, its new partnership with PayPal allows merchants to accept credit cards without readers or extra hardware: “Merchants can immediately begin accepting credit cards with nothing but a phone … We’re excited to be working with PayPal and we hope that this partnership will improve mobile commerce for both consumers and merchants.”
Check out Card.io’s blog post here.