Squaring up Mobile Payments in Europe
Square, a service that enables consumers to accept credit and debit cards for payment through a reader attached to their smart phones, has done extraordinarily well in the U.S. since its launch in October 2010 and, if anything, has been going even stronger since one of the biggest names in the industry mounted a stiff challenge to its supremacy. Since PayPal launched its Square-like device two months ago, Jack Dorsey’s company has accelerated its growth, increasing the aggregate volume of processed transactions from $4 billion to $5 billion on an annualized basis in a single month, according to Bloomberg. I do have a slight preference for PayPal’s service, but I like both of them and the competition between the two will certainly benefit their American users.
But what about the rest of the world? Neither Square, nor PayPal Here is available to users outside of the U.S. and we don’t know whether either of them, or indeed any of their other U.S. rivals, has any plans to venture abroad anytime soon. What we do know, however, is that there is a Swedish start-up, called iZettle (it has no link to Apple), which has taken up the task and has just made its first foray outside of Scandinavia and into the U.K. I thought it was about time to say a few words about it...
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