Tag: smartphone payments

The business will be a rival, and was just opened under the name Affirm.

Co-founder of PayPal, Max Levchin, has just announced the launch of a business that will be a direct rival to the mobile payments segment of the company, which will be called Affirm.

This new company will add itself to the rapidly growing and highly competitive smartphone based marketplace.

The technology that is being offered through Affirm is meant to assist shoppers in completing mobile payments more quickly and easily when making purchases online by way of their devices such as smartphones and tablets, says the official website of the company. At the moment, eBay’s PayPal is the online payment leader, but it is facing growing competition from startups that are making their way into the mcommerce space.

Affirm is concentrating on streamlining mobile payments for a far faster checkout process.

The goal of the company is to help to decrease the amount of information that needs to be typed in when making a purchase over a small device such as a smartphone. Entering credit card numbers, shipping addresses, and other data can be time consuming and frustrating when using a very small screen or a touchscreen typing pad.

Affirm has claimed to have reduced the process of making a purchase online so that it involves two simply taps on the screen of a smartphone. The first is to actually choose Affirm on the website of the participating merchant, and the second is to actually confirm the order itself. At the moment, the identity of the user is confirmed through Facebook. Therefore, there will be a third step that must be taken for first time users, which involves having to log in to their Facebook accounts and then giving permission to use the Affirm app.

Levchin was one of PayPal’s two cofounders (Peter Thiel being the other), and held the position of Chief Technology Officer for four years. After that point, the online and mobile payments company was acquired by eBay. It was Levchin who created and constructed the unique and state of the art fraud prevention and online security systems for PayPal.

The two companies have come together to help to turn smartphones in a digital form of wallet.

Samsung and Visa have just announced that they will be working together to help to speed up the worldwide adoption of mobile payments services, by combining their expertise and technology.

This new combined effort will be based on NFC technology that is embedded in certain Samsung devices.

Called the Visa Mobile Provisioning Service, is designed to allow financial institutions to take advantage of transactions using mobile payments account information that is securely downloaded through the use of NFC technology.

Furthermore, the Visa payWave mobile payments applet will be loaded onto Samsung NFC devices.

This will automatically turn smartphones into a mobile payments option for the consumers who purchase them. According to the global head of product at Visa, Jim McCarthy, in a statement, “Samsung devices enabled with Visa payment functionality will no doubt be a powerful product offering — especially in markets where paying with a mobile device is becoming commonplace.”

McCarthy also added that the heart of ensuring that mobile payments become widely available worldwide is to provide financial institutions with a secure way of offering these millions of smartphone carriers with a way to safely store and transmit their account data. He explained that “that is exactly what Visa and Samsung are ready to deliver.”

This is not the first time that Samsung and Visa have worked together on mobile payments initiatives. They previously came together in May 2012 to take part in the trial that was held during the Olympics in London, when the limited edition Galaxy S III smartphone was distributed among the athletes for use during the games. Those phones had the payWave technology built in and allowed the users to register so that they could use the device to for a digital checkout at certain retailers in the city.

The next version of the device, the Galaxy S IV, will have the Visa mobile payments technology built right into it for use with its NFC chip. It is expected to be unveiled on March 14 at a press event.