Flint Mobile Taps an Unexpected Market in Mobile Payments

Mobile payment systems these days, it seems, might well fit into the “dime a dozen” price range.

With a host of competitors eager to land market share, from platform vendors to payment processors, everyone wants a slice of the mobile payments pie. But Flint Mobile has a new idea that may take a lot of these competitors by surprise in the form of Flint Mobile’s target market: developers.

Flint Mobile is out to make it easier for developers to bring in certain payment processors, a measure that combines the explosive growth of two separate markets: mobile payments and mobile apps. To that end, Flint Mobile wants to make it easier to take credit card payments by turning the mobile device itself and skipping the payment dongle.

With Flint Mobile tools, users will be able to scan a credit card rather than swipe it through a dongle for payment.

That makes it a lot simpler overall, and that’s just for starters. Flint works with Quickbooks Online, as well as digital payment tools and merchant portals, and even offers payment services within its own operation so as to make it faster to set up and easier to use.

Most recently, Flint brought out the App2App system, which can bring mobile payment systems to an app with just a little bit of code. Then, customer order data can be sent from a business app to the Flint app on the device, where card capture, processing, and receipt generation takes place.

There’s a lot of benefit with a system like this. Flint gets in on the mobile payments action, and merchants can take mobile payments without needing to turn to large amounts of new hardware.

Plus, there are plenty of extra features around to provide added value. That’s going to give Flint a real market advantage, one that it’s going to need since there are plenty of alternatives out there and the curve is so substantial.

It’s also going after a market that’s a lot less traveled by, and that should further help; taking the case directly to app developers should ultimately prove a valuable move.

Developers and small businesses—many of which are using regular consumer devices for business purposes—should be especially glad to see a platform that’s more specifically tailored to their concerns.