Tag: european mobile payments

Payleven has now stepped out of Germany for Android support in the Italy, Poland, and the U.K.

Payleven has just announced that its Android mobile payments app is exploding its way throughout Europe, as it leaves its previously exclusive Germany in favor of an addition of three more markets, which include Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

The app can now be downloaded in any of those countries through the Google Play Store.

The iOS app from that mobile payments company was already available in every market where that service is available. This includes Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Brazil, and the Netherlands. However, the company recognized that the Android environment presents a much larger number of challenges, simply because of the broad range of different types of hardware.

This meant that the mobile payments service needed to take far more variables into account.

A Payleven spokesperson explained that “As Android devices have different hardware components, it needs refinement to ensure app liability. So to actually launch Android perfectly in many countries is a long [process].”

Equally, though, while Android mobile payments may have meant greater complexity, it also has a tremendous user base, as the operating system has become a major dominant platform in the mobile commerce ecosystem. In fact approximately 70 percent of all worldwide smartphone shipments involve Android based devices.

This operating system is especially popular in the European market. For example, more than 70 percent of smartphones sold in Germany are based on that platform.

The Android mobile payments app from Payleven supports a number of different popular devices that use the platform. The company placed its primary compatibility focus on the most commonly used handsets, which include the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy SIII, Galaxy SII, as well as the HTC One Series line, which includes the One S, V, and X.

This mobile payments application allows merchants to use a dongle that is plugged into a compatible device in order to be able to accept debit and credit card transactions. The company charges the merchant 2.75 percent per transaction. It currently supports swipe-and-sign, but it has announced that in the first part of next year, it will also have a dongle that will accept chip-and-pin cards.

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.