payments

Mobile payments start-up Square has acquired a $100 million investment from venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, valuing the company at more than $1 billion.

The company announced the investment on its Twitter feed. "To continue to empower everyone to accept payments anywhere, we've raised $100 million in our Series C Financing, led by @kpcb," the company tweeted. KPCB partner Mary Meeker will also be joining Square's board of directors.

The new round of financing has quadrupled the company's value in just six months when a $27.5 million round of funding led … Read more

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is bullish on the growth of mobile payments in the coming year.

Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity today, Schmidt said he believes one-third of all restaurants and retail outlets will allow for mobile payments within the next year, the Financial Times reports him as saying. He reportedly told those in attendance that that number should be enough for widespread adoption of mobile payments.

"I judge that based on how long I think it takes, because the terminals are available now, the software is available now or this summer," the … Read more

Three of the top wireless providers in the U.K. are joining forces to speed up the deployment of mobile payments that will allow shoppers to pay for things with their cell phones, according to Reuters.

Thursday the news service reported that Everything Everywhere, the joint venture between Orange and T-Mobile, Vodafone and Telefonica's O2 have agreed to create a mobile commerce system that would bring together retailers, banks and advertisers.

For years, there's been talk that consumers would be able to use their phones to buy things using a technology called Near Field Communications, which allows very … Read more

Verizon is working on a mobile payments service for smartphones, tablets, and PCs with mobile payments start-up Payfone.

The two companies made the announcement today, but did not reveal many details about how the service would work or a target date for when it will be ready for customers.

According to the release, Verizon customers will be able to make "online purchases" from a phone, tablet, or PC and send the charges to their monthly Verizon bill, or "traditional payment methods through financial partners," which implies credit cards.

Payfone's system will handle the routing, pre-authorization, … Read more

Visa is continuing to gain ground in the mobile payments market with the acquisition of Fundamo, a service that is already prevalent in at least 40 developing markets.

Basically, the merger brings together Fundamo's mobile financial services platform, for customers with little to no access to a bank account, with Visa's global payments network, VisaNet. The gain for Fundamo users would be a higher level of security when making mobile payments, and Visa gets a bigger consumer base abroad.

Additionally, Visa reaffirmed an agreement with Monitise, which offers new services (i.e. mobile payments, person-to-person payments, mobile transaction … Read more

Consumers around the world could generate as much as $50 billion in sales through NFC-based mobile payments by 2014, according to a report released yesterday by Juniper Research.

NFC, or near-field communication, lets consumers pay for goods and services on the go through their mobile phones simply by touching or passing them over another NFC-equipped device such as a register or terminal. The funds themselves are transferred from the user's credit card account stored through the mobile phone.

A variety of industry players have kicked off their own efforts to tap into the potential of NFC.

Google recently announced … Read more

The payment service WePay launched a new online ticket store this week that competes in some ways with EventBrite. It's a logical addition to the growing service. But that's not what's interesting about WePay.

I'm seeing payment services companies like this popping up a bit more than I would have expected, given the serious regulatory and security issues involved in handling money in bulk (see Dwolla and Venmo). Talking about that with WePay founder Rich Aberman led to a fascinating discussion about how the company hopes to keep its fraud rate low enough to stay in … Read more

PayPal filed a lawsuit against Google today, alleging the Web giant misappropriated trade secrets from its mobile-payment business when it hired away a key executive in PayPal's mobile payments effort.

The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court in California, alleges that Osama Bedier, a former senior PayPal executive working on the company's mobile-payments platform, misappropriated PayPal's trade secrets when he went to work for Google earlier this year.

Bedier "is now leading Google's efforts to bring point of sale technologies and services to retailers on its behalf," according to … Read more

Google today introduced Google Wallet and Google Offers at an event in New York City.

The company says it plans to bring all parts of the retail experience together to make "tomorrow's best shopping experience," said Google Vice President of Commerce for Stephanie Tilenius.

The services will combine coupons and discounts and payments at the time people buy things through their phone.

Together the services will work like this: Coupons for items you buy regularly will pop up on your phone, or an item that the store you're shopping at is out of will pop up … Read more