Acceptance: Aisle Buyer Launches New Mobile Card Capture Solution
- The American start-up AisleBuyer has just developed a payment card capture technology to be embedded in smartphones. Merchants will then be able to accept payment card transactions by taking a picture of the given card with a smartphone.
- It relies on proprietary OCR software which identifies the card number as well as other pieces of information specified at the back of the medium.
- This new service has not yet been commercialised and is first intended for merchants only. They must subscribe a professional merchant account to use it. The US-based start-up then plans to spread the use of its technology to P2P payments.
- The iPhone and other smartphones are considered by some players as perfect platforms for mobile card payments. Square, VeriFone and Mophie have already developed payment card acceptance solutions for iPhone.
- This card capture solution is yet another means to turn smartphones into universal payment terminals. AisleBuyer’s technology is however different as it authorises payments made with all sorts of bank cards (magnetic stripe and smartcard) unlike Square’s dongle or VeriFone‘s device (Ad-On). These solutions are in fact limited to the acceptance of magnetic stripe card. In addition, this technology relies on proprietary software that can be downloaded on several kinds of smartphones and not only on the iPhone.
- VeriFone recently attacked Square and insisted that its device was not secure enough which enabled sensitive payment card data retrieval as they were slipped through the iPhone-attached reader. Square currently processes one million dollars transactions per day.