YC-Backed GoCardless Launches PayLinks, A Bitly For Payments. GoCardless, the Y Combinator-backed startup founded in 2010 by Oxford graduates Hiroki Takeuchi, Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson, is today launching a new product called PayLinks which aims to be something like a Bit.ly for payments. With its dead simple interface, anyone can create a shortened, tweet-friendly link in around 60 seconds, the company claims, allowing you to start collecting money online immediately. These payments can either be one-off requests (throw in on the keg!) , regular/subscription-based (subscribe to my blog!) , or pre-authorized. The latter, which makes sense for B2B scenarios, lets a company collect a pre-authorized amount over a pre-determined period of time.
The U.K. Since GoCardless’ launch in February, the company has signed up over 2,000 businesses to its service and is now growing at a rate of 50%+ every month, company co-founder Matt Robinson tells us. Fees for the service are low, too. OK, so now for the bad news. This 28-Year-Old Is Making Sure Credit Cards Won't Exist In The Next Few Years | Page 2 of 4. There's a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa that most people have never heard of.
Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne, and it's an innovative new way of thinking about online payments that sidesteps credit cards completely. Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month, or about $350 million per year. We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.
I'm told you're pissing off credit card companies. How are you doing that? Ultimately we're trying to build the next Visa, not the next PayPal. Dwolla started out of my old company. So I thought, how do I get paid through a website without paying credit card fees? That was three years ago, so we've been working on the project for a really long time. How many transactions are you doing? The average transaction volume for Dwolla is right around $500 dollars. Nope. MyBank - Home. Mobile Payments Startup Jumio Takes On Card.io With Credit Card Scanning Toolkit For App Developers. Mobile payments and identity verification company Jumio is introducing its Netswipe Mobile SDK today, which allows developers to add credit card scanning functionality to their mobile applications.
The SDK (software development kit), is available now for iOS, but an Android version is coming soon, the company says. To jump-start usage, Jumio is also waiving transaction fees for the SDK’s first users for a temporary period of time. The company is calling this a “$5 million fund,” but it’s not really a fund – it’s a just a discount to developers who choose to implement the solution. They’ll be able to try out the Jumio SDK in their apps before committing to paying the extra cost of doing so. The SDK allows developers to integrate the card-scanning technology into their app, which means users can hold up a credit card to their smartphone’s camera in order to have the card “read” by the app and the numbers automatically entered into the correct fields.
How Mobile Payments Will Evolve In the Next Several Years. Mobile payment has become a mainstream tech topic in the last couple of years, mirroring the rise of smartphones and application stores. E-commerce is becoming m-commerce. The focus point of the buzz has been the evolution of near-field communications as related to smartphones. The thing is, nobody in the payments industry expects NFC to be a player in mobile payments for years, if ever. In that case, what does the mobile payments ecosystem look like in the short term? The current mobile payments market centers around several cores: direct carrier billing, mobile wallets, online and offline sales, mobile credit card readers and application stores.
Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. The Non-Promise of NFC OK, let us get one thing straight: NFC may never be a widely used form of payments. See our series on NFC In 2011 for more on the world of NFC payments. NFC payments on the top of Gartner's Hype Circle.
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