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‘Europe’s Square’ iZettle Exits Beta In Nordics And Finds Workaround For Visa Acceptance

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http://techcrunch.com – iZettle — often called the “Square of Europe” for being an early mover in its dongle-based mobile payment service for small merchants — is definitely getting down to business now. Today, the Swedish-based startup announced that it has finally exited its beta phase across the rest of its Nordic footprint of Denmark, Finland and Norway, including a launch of its Android service, and it has come up with a workaround to accept Visa payments in those markets once again, after a hiccup over payment security saw Visa withdraw acceptance over iZettle’s chip-based readers. (IT news)

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Submitted by qq124 on 11/13/2012

Stories similar to ‘Europe’s Square’ iZettle Exits Beta In Nordics And Finds Workaround For Visa Acceptance

iZettle — what you might call the ‘Square of Europe’ given it’s also a dongle-based mobile payment service for small merchants — will now launch a new Chip & Pin device alongside its existing solution that currently uses a customer’s signature to interact with the iZettle app. It will also now accept all major cards, including VISA.

iZettle, the European Square-a-like mobile payment dongle plus app service that’s raised €42.6 million($54.6 million) to-date, continues to bulk up its activity in Europe. Today it’s officially launching in the U.K. — having operated in beta since May. iZettle currently has 4,000 U.K.

iZettle, one of the many mobile payment companies vying for the title of the “Square of Europe,” is taking one more step to cover the market ahead of U.S. rivals like PayPal’s here and Intuit’s European commercial launches. Today, iZettle chalked up its first full API partner in the UK, the appointment platform BookingBug.

Square better get a move on launching its first non-U.S. mobile payment service because the market for point-of-sale mobile payments continues to hot up. We’ve been following the fortunes of Square-like competitors such as iZettle, mPowa and PayPal’s Here for a while.

The mobile payments landgrab is on in Europe. Today, iZettle announced that it is now open for business in Spain, taking its total number of markets to seven.

Today iZettle, one of the several Square-like mobile payments companies in Europe, announced that it was expanding its Series B round of €25 million and adding American Express as its newest investor. iZettle and AmEx are not disclosing the value of the new investment. It is joining Greylock, Northzone, MasterCard, SEB Private Equity in the round, which was originally €25 million ($31.4 million).

Flint, a small business-focused mobile payment app that does away with dongles and NFC and instead uses the camera on a phone to “scan” a card’s numbers, has come out of beta, with an iOS 6/ iPhone 5-compatible app now available to download in the U.S.

Visa believes that by 2020 more than half of all payments made in Europe will be done through mobile devices, so it is continuing to put more investment into how it will remain a central part of those transactions.

It’s so simple and disruptive I wonder why others haven’t really tried it. Droplet is a mobile money app on iOS that lets you load cash onto your phone and send payments to anyone – including participating retailers – for free, via email.