The acquisition of the startup Mobeewave will allow Apple to turn its iPhone into a payment terminal.
© Unsplash / Glodi Miessi
Apple puts the overdrive in the landscape fintech. The california firm, which has become the largest market capitalization in the world (1,84 trillion dollars), has just acquired the startup in montreal Mobeewave, specialized in the transformation of smartphones into real payment terminals.
This is an area on which Square (which holds Cash App) was still quite quiet and took advantage of offering simple solutions for merchants to have facilities for card payments. SumUp and iZettle benefited also from the market selling SMALL mobile. But with this acquisition, Apple has found a way to penetrate the market and radically transform it.
Eventually, the iPhone will become true payment terminals, capable of receiving money payments made by the NFC chips for banking cards and contactless and mobile payment. The system works via an application and does not require any additional hardware.
Samsung in the race for a year
As outlined our colleagues from Pymnts, according to information revealed by Bloomberg, the repurchase agreement would amount to $ 100 million. Apple would have acquired the startup and a pilot project had already started to develop the integration of the technology on the iPhone.
However, Apple is not the first brand to venture on the subject and to see the work of Mobeewave. Last year, Samsung had also approached the company and worked with it to develop its own application. Difficult to know today if the redemption of the box canadian by Apple will have negative consequences for Samsung. The offices are based in Montreal, where 100 employees Mobeewave work, will remain in activity.
Recently, Mobeewave partnered with another startup : Incentivio, which is specialized in the experience digital restaurants. With it, an application solution to transform the payment terminals would be an excellent solution to prevent traders to get rid of the problems subscriptions equipment, often expensive. This evolution in the approach follows the logic of things for the fintech and mobile payments.
The arrival of QR codes in Apple Pay
Three weeks ago, a discovery in iOS 14 by 9to5Mac indicated that Apple was looking to improve its implementation of Apple Pay in the adorning feature of QR Code. Hard to know if its redemption of Mobeewave is in the link, but the digital wallet Apple account add QR codes that will allow to get rid again of the payment terminals.
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