The financial institution has now launched their new program that is smartphone friendly.
An affiliate of Bank of America has just announced that it has developed a mobile payments system for businesses, taking their first major leap into that highly competitive marketplace.
The new system will allow companies to accept transactions over smartphones and tablets.
The mobile payments system is called “Mobile Pay on Demand” and it gives merchants the opportunity to increase their payment method options by plugging a secure debit and credit card reader into an iPad or a smartphone and using it in combination with a free app. Bank of America has stated that it will not have a monthly fee program for the service. Instead, it has opted to charge a per swipe fee of 2.7 percent.
This mobile payments service will become available to merchants as of December 3, 2012.
According to the Bank of America Merchant Services CEO, Tom Bell, “Clearly, smartphones and now tablet technologies are becoming ubiquitous.” He added that “Now it’s up to each of us to innovate in that space. We feel we’ve brought a product to market that is innovative.”
Bank of America Merchant services is a privately owned organization under the joint ownership of First Data Corp and Bank of America Corp.
The announcement arrived just as the bank has been making a growing number of moves into the mobile payments and technology world. This is the case both for their business customers as well as on the consumer side. Bank of America CEO, Brian Moynihan, has shared that there are currently 11.5 million tablet and smartphone banking customers with the bank, as per the statistics he used at a conference on November 13. He gave the specific example of the bank in Charlotte, where there are 50,000 to 60,000 customers signing up for these services every week.
As a pioneer among the major banks for releasing apps for tablets and smartphones, the corporation felt that mobile payments was a natural fit with their brand and their image. That said, it will still need to face the challenge presented to all new joiners to the market, which is to try to catch up with the progress that Square has been making.
