11–20 of 46 posts
"For just $1, anybody can have the functionality of a full blown credit card reader on their phone." This will not end well.
Why? Anyone can already type in credit card number,ccv,etc by hand for zero dollars - surely it's not a disaster?
Interesting perspective from American Banker. If anything, Square is shaking up the established market and getting established industry veterans working on true mobile payment. > Beth Robertson, the director of payments research for Javelin Strategy and Research of Pleasanton, Calif., said that if Square is able to allow merchants and consumers to accept card payments without a conventional merchant account, that may…
Isn't that called PayPal? Square is PayPal, but on the iPhone; it doesn't seem hard to understand. And it's surprising that PayPal themselves missed this opportunity, given that they started on the Palm.
Edit: Not that I don't like this idea as a business invention, because it really does ease taking payments for service-based companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Anyone can already type in credit card number,ccv,etc by hand for zero dollars - surely it's not a disaster?
But without a hurdle-laden merchant account they can't process them.
Interesting perspective from American Banker. If anything, Square is shaking up the established market and getting established industry veterans working on true mobile payment. > Beth Robertson, the director of payments research for Javelin Strategy and Research of Pleasanton, Calif., said that if Square is able to allow merchants and consumers to accept card payments without a conventional merchant account, that may…
allow merchants and consumers to accept card payments without a conventional merchant account Isn't that called PayPal? Square is PayPal, but on the iPhone; it doesn't seem hard to understand. And it's surprising that PayPal themselves missed this opportunity, given that they started on the Palm.
> Just as Napster allowed people to directly share music online, PayPal enables people to exchange money instantly without having to open expensive merchant accounts to accept credit cards. Yet to Levchin's surprise, advanced cryptography has had little to do with PayPal's success. Rather, the company's rapid adoption by millions of small businesses and individuals operating chiefly on Internet auction site eBay is largely credited to Levchin's more recent obsession: developing financial surveillance software that closely monitors PayPal's customers and almost instantly alerts both the company and law enforcement officials to any suspicious account activity. "We mine millions and millions of transactions in real time," Levchin says.
If it was profitable to make it easy to get a merchant account it seems that this market is developed enough that it would have figured it out by now.
Square makes it sound like they are effectively "merchant accounts for everyone" Makes me wonder what they have figured out on the fraud prevention side that nobody else has.
I don't get what Square understands that merchant account providers do not. There are tons of merchant account providers whose best interest is to give you an account, yet they still make you jump through all kinds of hoops to get one because fraud is so costly to them. (Chargebacks are expensive). If it was profitable to make it easy to get a merchant account it seems that this market is developed enough that it wou…
I don't get what Square understands that merchant account providers do not. There are tons of merchant account providers whose best interest is to give you an account, yet they still make you jump through all kinds of hoops to get one because fraud is so costly to them. (Chargebacks are expensive). If it was profitable to make it easy to get a merchant account it seems that this market is developed enough that it wou…
One possibility from the video (n.b. I had it muted): Requiring a photograph of the buyer, as well as their signature, might help quite a bit with fraud prevention...
I really like the idea behind Square, but are customers really going to trust a dongle hanging out the end of someone's phone? Whats to stop someone reverse engineering the dongle and creating a spoofed client that just records the data instead of performing a charge?
So? That's already a risk every time your card leaves your sight. The details on the strip aren't much more than what's on the front of the card. I know I had access to people's cards back when I worked retail. The store-copy of receipts had full card number, name, and expiration date. This device is the least of your security worries when it comes to a credit card.
I really like the idea behind Square, but are customers really going to trust a dongle hanging out the end of someone's phone? Whats to stop someone reverse engineering the dongle and creating a spoofed client that just records the data instead of performing a charge?