Boston-based mobile commerce company AisleBuyer is gearing up its team, partnerships, and technology in order to launch with some well known national retailers this summer. Today the company made a big announcement on the technology front, letting the world know how it plans to capture mobile payments.
The company will be leveraging scanning technology — currently used within the company’s app offering to scan items while in the store — to also capture payment card information. By scanning your credit card using your phone’s camera, AisleBuyer then converts the information into a more readable form that can transmit payment over card networks like Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express. This is all thanks to a technology called optical character recognition (OCR).
“The applications for card capture technology are vast, and just another part of how retailers can personalize and improve the customer experience,” said Andrew Paradise, CEO of AisleBuyer. “By cutting out this payment barrier, retailers are more likely to close a sale and customers are able to easily conduct a transaction, making this a valuable technology to both parties.”
The company says the technology will be rolled out over the course of the next few months (currently AisleBuyer has only one app with Magic Beans, a company with several locations here in the Boston area). Many tech outlets like VentureBeat and GigaOM are pegging the company as a Square competitor but, as anyone in Boston knows who has seen an AisleBuyer exec speak, this company is on a mission to transform your entire in-store experience.
The company says its offering is PCI Level 1 compliant (a payment industry standard that aims to act as a audit for keeping your payment card information safe). This means no personal info is stored on your phone.
“Our card capture technology does not store the photo of the credit card after the account number has been processed by our patent pending image recognition algorithm. After the personal account details are translated into machine readable format, they are stored using the same PCI Level 1 compliant techniques as with any eCommerce transaction,” said Paradise.
What’s unknown in this announcement? What AisleBuyer plans to charge merchants for the service — a factor many argue will dictate the early days of mobile payment provider success (those being the cheapest most likely to be adopted).
One thing is for sure: this solution requires no hardware on the side of the merchant in order to accept mobile payments, making it a much more attractive option than many other alternatives out there.
