I write a lot about mobile payments, and the Boston companies in that space, in part because I love the idea. The mobile wallet can’t get here soon enough, in my opinion. And yet for all the progress that mobile payments have made, credit and debit cards remain the norm. And it turns out there’s still plenty of innovation going on in the world of plastic.

That point was driven home for me a couple weeks back when Rhode Island startup Swipely shared a rather impressive milestone: $1 million in sales in a week on its payment processing platform.

Payment processing basically means the software that authenticates credit card information and handles the completion of the payment. So how is Swipely innovating in this space? With lots of data.

The value that Swipely can offer is two-fold. First, it gives small businesses analytics about their customers. Second, it offers a series of marketing tools to engage with customers, utilizing that data. Incidentally, this is what LevelUp is betting on, too.

And they’re seeing lots of traction, both because they’re offering value, and because they’re not trying to move mountains by pushing consumers from one payment method to another. There’s plenty to be disrupted in this space, whether you’re paying with a smartphone or with plastic.