Tag: verifone mobile payments

The latest services from the companies have been unveiled for use by the retail marketplace.

VeriFone Systems Inc. and The Pinnacle Corp. have both announced their launches of brand new mobile payments solutions for the retail market space, at a time when these unveilings are being made with increasing speed by various entrants to this ecosystem.

This new point of sale service is a part of the partnership that has been made with the National Payment Card Association.

Pinnacle is an automated technology provider for the petroleum and convenience store industries. It entered into a partnership with the National Payment Card Association (NPCA) in order to be able to launch the Pinnacle Palm POS mobile payments service. The solution is designed to give retailers an app that has been customized with their own branding and that will permit consumers who use it to use their smartphones to make purchase transactions instead of a debit or credit card.

This mobile payments solution uses a very simple strategy for its card authorization.

The design of the system means that the mobile payments user will not need to share his or her personal data across a network. Moreover, it also means that the existing infrastructure for the retailer will not need to be changed, said Pinnacle. The Palm POS smartphone transaction service will broaden the partnership between the company and the NPCA for six years.

According to Drew Mize, the chief operating officer from Pinnacle “We are very excited about the launch of our mobile payments strategy, leveraging our existing and successful partnership with NPCA of many years and their portfolio of intellectual property.” He went on to say that they are providing a solution that is outside of PCI’s scope, which “is based on the foundation of standards that is being evaluated by PCATS; and designed to support both outside and inside payments, this solution has potential for rapid deployment by any retailer using Palm POS.”

The NPCA is now offering the mobile payments through Palm POS to users of both Android and iOS based smartphones. At the same time, VeriFone has announced its own portable, countertop, and smartphone transaction systems.

The marketplace is rocked by the shocking news that a major player has dropped out.

The CEO of VeriFone, Doug Bergeron, has stunned the direct-to-micromerchant mobile payments world with the announcement that it is stepping out of that marketplace following unprofitable results from its Sail service.

The point-of sale provider’s mcommerce news came as a surprise to the majority of the industry.

As VeriFone had dedicated a great deal of last year and much of this year on the promotion of the growth of mobile payments services, the decision that the company has now made to remove itself from that direct-to-micromerchant space has caused many heads to spin. The announcement was made during the most recent quarterly conference call.

The CEO released the mobile payments news that the company is stepping down.

During the call, Bergeron stated that Sail, its own mobile payments service, has been unprofitable. This program had been giving small businesses the ability to use smartphones and tablets to accept transactions through debit and credit cards. He said that “Customer acquisition costs, either through search engines or TV advertising, cannot and will never justify the razor thin margins produced by merchants with infrequent volumes and extremely high attrition.”

The NFC technology community has also been left blinking in surprise, as it had been looking toward that company to propel forward its adoption, particularly after the iPhone 5 was released without its capabilities.

Bergeron described the mobile payments program at VeriFone as a failure and is now causing many of the other players in the industry to take a second look at their own potential for profitability. This is particularly the case after the CEO questioned the ability of the environment to be profitable at all. The company has announced that all of its assets from that space will now be sold off.

He explained that he felt it is possible to see similar thoughts among the competition as their businesses models are shifted toward wallets services. It is his belief that the only mobile payments players who will be able to survive “this fundamentally challenging business model” will be those who are capable of offering micro merchants other services, as well.