Tag: EU mobile payments

A new survey has revealed that a growing number of companies in the E.U. accept payments via smartphones.

A new report has recently been released by yStats.com, a secondary market research company based in Hamburg, Germany, which has suggested that European mobile payments is a growing trend in the continent.

The report also pointed out that more companies are accepting transactions online, boosting regular e-commerce.

The “Europe Online Payment Methods 2013 – Second Half 2013” report showed that the use of smartphones for European mobile payments is growing in use for making traditional retail purchases in the E.U. countries as well as in other regions around the world. The report pointed out that the transactions being completed by way of smartphones and tablets has been increasing its share of the overall digital space, and that it is expected to make its way into the double digits by the year 2020.

In 2010, European mobile payments represented only 1 percent of all online forms of transaction.

This will require an extremely rapid level of growth an adoption if it is to reach at least 10 percent of online transactions only a decade later. The reports data showed that this technology is making the biggest headway in Turkey, Spain, and the Netherlands, among countries located in Europe. This is particularly true in the use of smartphone banking. The highest traditional online banking – where it is above 80 percent, is in Norway, Finland, and the Netherlands.

There is extremely promising growth being seen in European mobile payments and traditional online transactions in the mature markets of the central part of the continent. For example, in Germany, PayPal and invoice were the two most popular forms of B2C E-Commerce transaction methods. Furthermore, the smartphone paying method is starting to take off quickly in areas that have implemented terminals for parking or ticketing, with 10 percent of consumers having tried those technologies at least one time in 2012.

The report predicted that in the Western sub-region of the continent, the transaction value of European mobile payments will be growing by half in 2013 when compared to the year before.

The latest addition to the company’s availability is in Spain, raising its number of E.U. countries to seven.

The increasingly popular mobile payments startup from Sweden, iZettle, has just announced that it is taking its first steps into Spain, which has boosted its availability in the European Union to include seven different countries.

The service provides small businesses with a way to receive credit card transactions over smartphones.

The company is already offering mobile payments options to small businesses in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany. It has also brought Visa transactions to Finland, Norway, and Denmark as of November 2012. They were able to accomplish this goal following the settlement of an issue between the two companies that had been outstanding.

The mobile payments will be expanding to Spain with an eye on small and struggling businesses.

The expansion into Spain is meant to provide small business owners who “are hurting” with new mobile payments options, said an mcommerce news release by the company. At the moment, there is no subscription fee for the company’s services and there is no minimum monthly fee. Instead, it charges a flat 2.75 percent per transaction.

The service works for either Android or iOS devices, and the mobile payments are compatible with all of the major credit cards including Amex, Visa, and MasterCard. This places iZettle in direct competition with a number of other companies that are offering comparable services within the European small business marketplace.

For example, there is a German startup called Payleven that is providing mobile payments services for Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Another example is Elavon, which is also headquartered in Europe and has just recently expanded into Ireland as of October, after being active exclusively in the United Kingdom until then.

Among the most recent mobile payments companies to make its way into the European marketplace is a company from Holland called Adyen. It is similar to iZettle in that it functions on both iOS and Android, but it is designed for large retailers so that they can make a point of sale in any location that there is an employee, in order to reduce lineups at the checkout counters.