Fancy being able to use fingerprints to enable payment verification on PayPal for making purchases?
Having announced that feature with the Samsung Galaxy S5 at Mobile World Congress back In February, PayPal finally debuted that integration today — letting users in 25 different countries login to PayPal by simply placing one of their chubby digits on their brand new phone’s fingerprint sensor.
Getting free apps and services with a new smartphone isn’t rare; handset makers often use freebies to encourage consumers to adopt their latest product. But Samsung’s $600 “Galaxy Gifts Package” that comes bundled with its new Galaxy S5 is worth talking about.
It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago when PayPal last overhauled its mobile apps with a brand new user interface, but in a new update for Android and iOS this week, the company has changed its look again.
The “bold new design” is a much better fit for Android’s Holo user interface guidelines, while its lack of virtual stitching a fake leather will surely please those upgrading to iOS 7 later this month.
Square is courting small business with new rules and lower transaction fees.
Last week, Square announced a partnership with Starbucks to provide back-end payment processing and CRM for the coffee mega-company. Today, Square brings news of the other end of the business spectrum. Small businesses who make less than $250,000 per year will no longer have to pay the standard 2.75 percent per swipe processing fee (though they can still opt for this) if they pay one flat rate, currently set at $275 monthly.
If a small businesses chooses the flat rate option, they’ll essentially end up paying 1.3 percent per swipe – a significant savings if they meet the criteria. IF the business goes over the line, they’ll be charged the standard per-swipe rate.
This is Square making sure that it can have as many users as possible, from super corporate giants to small mom and pop shops with a bit of tech savvy.
Major retails join forces on mobile payments system to fend of Google, PayPal, Isis, and other potential digital wallet competitors like Apple.
In a move that makes the Square/Starbucks partnership announced last week look like small potatoes, a group of national and international retailers announced plans to develop their own mobile payment network complete with mobile apps and digital wallet functionality. The move seems almost certain to shake up the nascent mobile payments market where a wide range of companies and organizations have been trying to figure out the secret sauce that will turn mobile payments into a mainstream retail system for the past couple of years.
The Merchant Customer Exchange or MCX, as the new company is known, plans to deliver a solution that offers convenience in both making purchases and in receiving customizable offers from retailers. Development of a mobile app and payment network are underway, but MCX has yet to announce any details about either the app or its network.
