New system in the United Kingdom could offer some direct competition to Square.
Intuit Inc. has announced that it is launching a new point of sale mobile payments pilot program for small businesses in the United Kingdom.
The company will now be offering its GoPayment point of sale product to small businesses in the U.K.
The new solution that is being launched is being called Intuit Pay. Its new offering will provide small businesses in the country the ability to process mobile payments both offline and online. The version being offered to British companies will also provide an affordable card reader that will be able to process cards with chips that require a PIN.
Intuit has been branching out into the mobile payments industry, though it is best known for its Quickbooks products.
Those products offer small businesses accounting software that has a low cost and is easy to use. Intuit is hopeful that the new mobile payments solution will help to address the issue in the United Kingdom of a low acceptance of credit and debit cards among small businesses.
A recent small business study in the U.K. that was performed by Intuit showed that among businesses with fewer than 10 employees, only 19 percent accept credit card transactions. When the fact that there are approximately 4.6 million small businesses in the United Kingdom, this represents a notable opportunity for mobile payments to step in and allow those companies to accept that type of transaction.
Furthermore, among the companies that participated in the study, almost half said that if they had an affordable means of accepting credit card and debit mobile payments through a tablet or smartphone, they would be interested in doing so.
According to the Intuit global business division vice president of products, Terry Hicks, “For many small businesses, accepting card payments has simply not been an attractive option.” Hicks added that “It can take weeks to get set up, the equipment and transactions can be expensive and there is no easy way to take payments on the go. With Intuit Pay you can sign up and begin accepting card payments within minutes.”
The mobile payments app and credit and debit card reader makes it possible for transactions to be processed anywhere through a smartphone or tablet.
