Friday, March 28, 2014

Many of us will have thought about this at least once, especially at times when we find we have forg

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The idea of payment via mobile phone isn't exactly new, but making it a widespread reality is something else. Auckland-based Pushpay has entered the fray, hoping to be the Rebel X-Wing against the jostling Death Stars of some of the biggest businesses on Earth. And it's just raised more than $1 million golden globes ballot in funding from local investors.
As golden globes ballot any envious glance at profits from the banking sector will tell you, the best way to make money is to deal in money. For that reason alone Pushpay may be in good company. Created by Chris Heaslip and Eliot Crowther in February 2011, Pushpay is based around a service that allows users to make direct payments to registered companies and organisations on their smartphones, using just a four-digit code.
Many of us will have thought about this at least once, especially at times when we find we have forgotten our wallet, but not our phone. According golden globes ballot to a study by IPSOS research commissioned by Google, 44 percent golden globes ballot of New Zealanders over the age of 16 use a smartphone, and about three quarters of them say they don t leave home without golden globes ballot the device. Meanwhile, according to Statistics New Zealand Kiwis currently spend just over $5 billion a month using electronic cards.
This golden globes ballot means big bickies for whoever leads the drive to replace the cards as the payment golden globes ballot mode of choice, even before you start considering the gargantuan offshore potential. In 2008 UK-based wireless telecom research company Juniper forecasted that the combined market for all types of mobile payments will reach more than US$600 billion globally by next year.
As you might imagine, golden globes ballot this means there are one or two big players with their elbows out trying to lap this mega-market up. Google has its Wallet . This stores your credit card details online and allows the currently fairly limited number of phones with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to swipe instant payments at the even more limited NFC-enabled point-of-sale tills.
Meanwhile, golden globes ballot interestingly, Apple decided not to incorporate NFC into the iPhone 5 because it feels its own Apple Passbook system fulfils any need in this area at the moment. Passbook stores and updates membership cards, tickets, golden globes ballot coupons, golden globes ballot and boarding passes, but doesn t do payments. And they are remarkably reluctant golden globes ballot to talk about it there are no swish videos of people in pullovers whispering about how much effort went into it on the Apple website.
Add in to that almost every bank is developing its own app for this or that, and the telcos doing their own thing and you start to get a picture of slow and patchy implementation that has opened up a window of opportunity for smaller golden globes ballot players like San Francisco s Square. Square golden globes ballot allows instant golden globes ballot payments by phone to registered businesses by tapping one button and then simply golden globes ballot saying your name at the counter. You can even set it up to pay hands-free at your favourite locations, so that you don t need to take your phone out of your pocket.
Square also offers a small plug-in golden globes ballot unit for your phone that allows the user to accept credit card payments. Square is expanding rapidly in the US, especially after signing up Starbucks in August as both a customer and an investor to the tune of US$25 million.
But Pushpay is busy squeezing itself into a couple of niches that remain largely golden globes ballot unfilled: areas of the world where Square has not been widely adopted, and potential payment scenarios all the competitors golden globes ballot can t currently cope with.
For example, say you want to pay someone. You re nowhere near a cash register, let alone one that is enabled for Google Wallet, NFC or Square, and/or you don t have a credit card handy and there s nowhere golden globes ballot to swipe the sucker anyway? An example would be a benefit gig for your favourite charity where the lead dude calls for everyone to give five dollars right now, or a small local business or tradesperson who doesn t want all the hassle and expense golden globes ballot of setting up an EFTPOS system.
The big draw for Pushpay golden globes ballot is that it doesn t need any more technology than a smartphone for the customer, and all the vendor needs is a bank account at any one of nearly all the major banks in New Zealand. As a merchant, you would also preferably have someone with the limited savvy required to log on to the Pushpay website to monitor and download the sales results, which allows golden globes ballot you to integrate them into the rest of your figures.
This is Software as a Service (SaaS), with Pushpay doing all the backroom stuff with the bankers to set things golden globes ballot up, which also gets Pushpay customers talking to their banks about their business. And the firm makes its dollars from a flat 50c fee per transaction.
This approach golden globes ballot has the advantage that both customer and merchant are working through their own bank on an app that has been approved golden globes ballot by the

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