Smart phones have been burning the midnight oil boosting their abilities and ability to boast all on the myriad of apps one can get for their smart phone. The credit card world was not going to go unnoticed and unrecognized in what could easily add a notch to their gun belt. There have been cell phone packages for a few years, but not all were reliable. There has been apps for the i-phone, blackberry, and droid for a little while now, but with RoamPay’s new $20 smart phone swipe the world has opened up.
Here’s what you do, you get a merchant account (Retail, no less), buy a $20 RoamPay plugin, download the credit card app for your phone, and once you have installed the account: you’re done. We had to try it here in the Batcave, so we ordered a RoamPay and plugged it into a Droid phone and voila, it was done. Super light, superbly easy; and it allows someone to take their business with them AND still get a swiped card rate instead of a hand-keyed rate which is a substantial reduction in fees. It also tries to make it easy and less cumbersome by giving the business the customer an option of having a receipt emailed to them.
Since it’s official release to our spectrum of the merchant account world two weeks ago, we have had cabs, contractors, and even tradeshow vendors jumping to add this to their ability. This is because as long as they can get a single cellphone bar’s worth of signal, they now they can keep processing transactions and all at the Retail Discount Rate.
A lot of people wonder how this can be done using a simple 10mm headphone jack to pass the data and still maintain PCI compliance (if you don’t know PCI, simply picture an Orwellian Big Brother for the merchant account’s bleak and dismal dystopian world which is terrorized by an Uber-Third Reich risk department with REJECTED stamp the size of a small continental shelf). Well for once, the answer is simple. The magnetic swipe reader that is compartmentalized inside of most credit card terminals is a simple machine at best. It is often found outside of a terminal stuck to teh side of a monitor or stuck in a keyboard and simply plugs into the back of the computer. It’s magnetic or mag reader collects the track one and two data that is stored on a credit card stripe and ports it into a computer or terminal. Its sole job it to pick up and hand off data like a runner in a relay race. there is almost no need for PCI compliancy as the technology for this one piece of hardware has barely budged in years.
No, all the real work is built inside the smart phone app. Having been in the industry now for over a decade and getting my start and earning my executive’s chair in a company that built and marketed credit card processing software, I can easily say that is where the Herculian tasks fall. The app builders had to jump through slightly less than ten zillion hoops just to get the app to work within the parameters of the data size they have all while maintaining PCI compliance. Hat off to them. The RoamPay is simply a clever way to bundle the mag swipe up and have it phone ready and user friendly.
Meridian Services 