IZettle ships chip and PIN reader

IZettle has launched a chip and PIN version of its dongle for turning mobile phones into card payment terminals and inked a partnership deal with Spain's Banco Santander.

  10 2 comments

IZettle ships chip and PIN reader

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

The chip and PIN reader - which costs £49 - connects wirelessly, via Bluetooth, to a smartphone or tablet and works with a free app that lets merchants accept card payments and manage their business.



The firm is still offering its chip and signature dongle but says the chip and PIN offering - available immediately in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Norway and Finland - extends the technology to firms with "higher transaction volumes".

The move also helps to allay concerns voiced by Visa, which last year put a halt to processing transactions for several months over security fears. IZettle initially addressed the problem with convoluted workaround involving the sending of a text message, with an embedded URL, sent via the merchant to the purchaser's phone, with card details entered at a secure Web site.

It has now followed German rival Payleven in giving merchants a simpler option. Another upstart in the crowded app and dongle market, mPowa, last year ditched its signature offering completely, asking merchants not to use it and promising to replace it with a chip and PIN reader.

Jacob de Geer, CEO, iZettle, says: "After seeing a great demand and take up on our Chip & Signature solution, adding a Chip & PIN reader to our product offering enables us to extend our target group of individuals and micro merchants to include businesses with higher transaction volumes."

In a separate development, the Swedish outfit has bagged a deal with Santander, which will promote the technology to Spain's self-employed professionals and micro merchants as part of its Innova programme.

Francisco Fernández Cué, head, payments, Banco Santander, says: "In Spain alone there are more than one million self-employed, professionals, and micro-companies that, due to the mobile nature of their business, need an option that is more flexible than conventional card terminals."

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Comments: (2)

A Finextra member 

So is this a mini merchant terminal with full emv and pci certification and is bluetooth a secure communication protocol to transfer data from the pin pad to the mobile phone and then onwards to the payment network? In that case one can see that the mobile phone is more or less an expensive modem for a small merchant terminal. It will be interesting to see if these devices would be better than custom built small size portable terminals with mobile communication.

A Finextra member 

I haven't seen ANY PCI or EMVCo certs...  What about MC TQM or UK Common Criteria???

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