Author: Dan Gendro

Subway is introducing new payment options through its websites and mobile application

Famed restaurant chain Subway is taking another step into the mobile commerce field by offering a new payment option through its mobile application. The new option will support PayPal transactions and is meant to make ordering and paying for food more convenient for customers. Subway intends to see more people use its mobile app and believes that integration with PayPal will help with the application’s appeal to consumers that are beginning to rely more heavily on their mobile devices.

Company seeks to become more flexible in order to meet the needs of its customers

Ken Moy, Subway’s director of global payments and emerging commerce, notes that the company has recognized the advent of mobile devices and the role they are beginning to play in the evolving field of commerce. Subway wants to establish a greater presence among mobile consumers, who are looking for more convenient way to purchase products that they are interested in. In order to accommodate the needs of consumers, Subway is looking for new ways to become flexible and engage consumers.

PayPal integration will be completed by the end of this year

By the end of this year, PayPal will be fully integrated into the Subway mobile application. Mobile payments made through the app will be supported at more than 27,000 Subway locations throughout the United States. The company’s mobile application is being powered by technology developed by Paydiant, a mobile wallet developer that was recently acquired by PayPal. Subway restaurants will support mobile payments made in person and payments will also be supported online through the company’s website.

A growing number of companies are beginning to take mobile payments more seriously

Mobile payments are beginning to play a major role in the business world. More companies are working to find ways to support these payments in order to satisfy the demand coming from consumers that have become interested in mobile commerce. Subway is one among several companies that have begun to play a larger role in the mobile commerce space.

Malicious mobile apps are becoming an increasingly problematic expense for advertisers.

Forensiq, a fraud detection firm, has now announced the results of its recent research, which indicated that mobile security issues produced by malicious apps are generating an additional cost to advertisers that is close to $1 billion every year.

In-app advertising has become a tremendous business, worth an estimated $20 billion in the United States.

This rate is continuing to grow along with the popularity of smartphones. However, of that amount that is being spent on mobile marketing, it is being estimated that about a twentieth of it is actually being wasted. Mobile security issues in the form of fraudulent and malicious apps that can hijack smartphones and convert them into ad-viewing botnets could be costing as much as $1 billion of that $20 billion in advertising money.

There are now many different known forms of these mobile security issues that plague device users and advertisers.

While there are a broad spectrum of different types of mobile fraud, which includes gadget emulation, location spoofing, and mobile user-agent spoofing, in addition to user acquisition scams, Forensiq says that it doesn’t stop there. It claims to have identified a new type of fraud, which it calls “mobile device hijacking.”

What that involves is the use of a malicious app that pretends to act as a human on a device by loading new pages or using various different application functions, each of which cause the device to load advertising. That said, while this may somewhat replicate human behavior, it also loads a much larger number of ads than would be the case with normal usage – up to 20 ads each minute. Often, this occurs in the background while the application in question isn’t being used, so that the owner of the device won’t even see that it is happening.

This mobile security problem is leading to an estimated $1 billion in lost dollars for marketers, but it also causes the device to eat through a user’s battery life and bandwidth. This means that it’s not just advertisers who are paying for this fraud, but the device owners, themselves, will also often face increased costs.