iZettle brings Square functionality to Scandinavia
Square has become almost like a generic term for mobile card payment systems due to its success in the US. The service allows you to accept card payments using a small attachment for iOS devices, and has done a lot to revolutionize the mobile payment industry. Square is however US only, and what tends to happen when a company is incapable of doing an international launch itself is that someone comes along and does it for it. That is what’s happened in Scandinavia, where iZettle is now launching a similar service. It’s a lot the same in many ways, though the dongle is larger and appears to use the embedded chip in the card instead of the magnetic strip, which was abolished in Norway at least last year.
The iZettle team is sending out 5000 readers per country as a beta test, and I signed up and hope that I made the cut. If so, I will report back how it works. It seems very much the same as Square though, from software to allow it to be used by businesses to a per-transaction fee instead of a yearly or monthly cost of ownership. Naturally this has sparked debates about security from people who seem to not have discovered that all you need in order to empty someone’s debit card is the information printed on the card itself, but hopefully the iZettle will see the same kind of success that Square has.
[iZettle]
