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Mobile Payments Startup, iZettle, Partners With 4G Carrier EE For Formal U.K. Launch, Tells Square To Steer Clear Of Europe “Battle”

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http://techcrunch.com – 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. users — around 5 percent of its total user-base — and said interest in its system during the trial phase has been “enormous.” iZettle has partnered exclusively with carrier EE for its formal U.K. service launch — iZettle CEO and co-founder, Jacob de Geer said the (IT news)

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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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The landgrab among Square-influenced mobile payment companies in Europe continues apace: in today’s development, SumUp — which launched in August with more than $20 million in backing from b-to-v Partners, Shortcut Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures and Klaus Hommels, the early Skype, Facebook and Xing investor — today is announcing that it is opening for business in Italy, Spain and

Square has taken its first step outside of the U.S. for its mobile payment service: it is now live in Canada. The company said today that its mobile card reader/processor is now available nationwide, priced at the same rate as in its home market: 2.75% per swipe. In the U.S.

Mobile payments company Bango — partner to Facebook, Amazon, BlackBerry and others to enable app and content charges directly to your mobile phone bill — has announced another major carrier partner: Telefonica is enabling Bango payments via its payment API. The global deal (RNS statement embedded below) will mean that developers who make apps for Telefonica’s 314 million subscrib