mobile payment

Verizon Wireless in association with American Express are integrating Serve online payment system for the use in mobile phones and tablets.

Customers may fund their Serve accounts via an existing credit or debit card or checking account, and then make purchases from a mobile device. The payment is authenticated with the user's mobile number.

Besides, customers will be given a Serve card when signing up for the service. This card then can be used for in-person purchases in stores.

Smartag, a division of Identive Group, announced that it gained an order from "a leading mobile handset manufacturer" to design and supply more than one million NFC tags within a period of 6 months. The tags will be included in-box with each purchase of an NFC-enabled smart phone. The company didn’t name the smartphone maker.

Hypercom Corporation announced that Avant-Garde Marketing Solutions has selected its Optimum M4230 multi-application mobile payment terminal and Mobile Network service. Avant-Garde also will be marketing these solutions to its thousands of merchant customers nationwide.

Avant-Garde will be marketing the M4230 mobile terminal along with Hypercom’s Mobile Network as an affordable bundled solution that increases businesses’ revenue by enabling them to extend their payment acceptance reach beyond fixed locations.

A provider of image based authentication and verification solutions Confident Technologies Inc announced a new product Confident Multifactor Authentication. The solution represents a two-factor authentication that delivers an image-based authentication challenge to users' mobile phones for a more secure out-of-band authentication process.

A mobile payments trial has been started in Czech Republic by Telefónica O2 Czech Republic, Komerční Banka, Citibank Europe, supermarket chain Globus and Visa Europe.

The test program will be trialed with the participation of 200 clients of both Citibank and Telefonica as well as two hundred common clients of Komerční Banka and Telefonica. The payments will be made with Samsung Star 5230 NFC phones at three Globus hypermarkets in Prague as well as a Globus store in the city of Pilsen.

American Express has entered into a partnership with Sprint to offer mobile customers an access to ServeSM, a recently launched digital payment platform from American Express. It is the first relationship with a mobile carrier since the service launch in March.

Now Sprint customers will be able to use Serve mobile wallet application on their select Android-based smartphones. Sprint customers with these devices can find Sprint Zone, which also provides Sprint account information, recommends apps and more, as an icon on their Sprint mobile device.

eBay Inc has agreed to purchase a provider of payments through mobile carrier billing Zong. The deal is estimated approximately at $240 million in cash. The company expects that combined with PayPal, Zong will add complementary technology and talent that help strengthen PayPal’s leadership position in mobile payments and digital goods.

Admeris Payments, an mCommerce provider for retail, advertising, app developers, digital media, publishing and telecom billion unveiled new payment industry solution OneTouch.

OneTouch is meant to help solve three main mCommerce problems: authentication of customers and their smartphones; ease-of-use to perform single and repeat transactions and powerful cryptographic security design to reduce fraud against merchants and consumers.

Citi Ventures, a unit of Citigroup, has invested in Billing Revolution, a mobile payments provider. Last year Citi Ventures sponsored Billing Revolution’s Single-Click Checkout, a cross-platform, low-friction mobile billing service.

A provider of Internet and mobile payment solutions Adyen announced the launch of a single-click mobile payment solution for iPhone and Android. Using the new platform app developers at the iTunes have an alternative payment gateway that accepts credit cards, PayPal and a range of other payment methods within mobile applications and mobile websites.

Tailored for mobile environment Adyen payment platform eliminates the need for merchants and developers to care for security and PCI compliance.

A mobile banking solutions provider Monster Offers has partnered with Iconosys Inc to integrate the Monster Offers one-click mobile payment solutions with more than 500 popular mobile phone applications like DealBuzzer™, DriveReply™, Trick or Tracker™, and Tell My Geo™.

As a part of their deal Monster Offers will be able to offer its mobile payment solutions through the current and future Iconosys distribution network of mobile phone application users.

Starbucks announced the addition of more payment options for its customers. The company is launching Starbucks for Android™ app providing more consumers access to the fastest way to pay and other features to manage their Starbucks Card on-the-go.

Besides, Safeway, Inc., one of the nation’s largest supermarket chains, plans to rollout mobile payment in July at nearly 1,000 Starbucks in Safeway supermarkets across the United States, including the company’s Vons, Pavilions, Dominick’s, Randalls, Tom Thumb and Genuardi’s stores.

A mobile commerce provider ROAM Data announced the launch of ROAMwallet API, a mobile checkout solution to turn the mobile marketing channel into a mobile sales channel.

Bling Nation, a US mobile payments service, announced about the “pause” of its activity to fix its business model that has failed to be attractive for merchants.

While it became very popular at the dawn of its business Bling Nation lost its way when it introduced FanConnect, a social media-heavy loyalty programme that was compulsory for Bling's bank and merchant partners.

Fiserv Inc announced that it now serves over 375 financial institutions with its Mobile Money mobile banking and payments solution. The company says that about 200 of these banks and credit unions are already live on the service, a double growth over the past 12 months. Number of consumers using the service increased by 600% within the past 6 months.