A recent feature in Fortune magazine titled ‘How mobile payments will grow in 2016’ (http://nnw.fm/DrEs0) shows the rosy future that lies before Singlepoint, Inc. (OTC: SING). The Fortune piece reports that ‘eMarketer (is) forecasting 210% growth in the total value of mobile payment transactions in 2016—up to $27.05 billion from $8.71 billion’. This is a market that is still in its infancy, and Singlepoint’s Pay-by-Text™ technology is precisely the sort of cutting edge innovation that can establish a niche in it.
Despite the promise of easier use and convenience, the Fortune piece reveals that ‘while 52% of North Americans are “extremely aware” of mobile payments, only 18% use them on a regular basis’, citing a recent Accenture survey. This is obviously an industry ripe for development. Millennials and higher income households are leading the way. The Accenture survey discovered that 23 percent of Millennials and 38 percent of higher-income households use ‘contactless payments at least once a week’.
Contactless payments are so called because they can be made without physical contact to the payments terminal. Most contactless payments systems use near field communication (NFC), which enables wireless communication between two devices, such as a mobile phone and a point-of-sale terminal, when they are very close together, typically just a few inches. NFC employs a technology that has been around for decades called radio-frequency identification (RFID), which allows the credentials of a device to be established by radio waves. RFID technology is commonly used to scan grocery items at checkout, on baggage tags and for tagging cattle.
However, Singlepoint’s platform differs from this mainstream approach, being based on short message service (SMS) technology. CEO Greg Lambrecht explains:
“We started in 2006 with a mobile messaging platform where we can send a text message to any phone in the U.S. and Canada. We have overlaid on top of that a way for people to use their credit card and their mobile phone to do a transaction or a donation but… we have married the text messaging and mobile transaction together, so when you get that text, there’s a link that you can hit and that will take you to a mobile landing page that you can do the transaction or donation.”
Singlepoint is differentiating itself from the competition in the mobile payments sector that mostly employs NFC technologies by providing a solution that links ubiquitous SMS to cash payments.
“That makes us different from some other ways of doing mobile transactions or other mobile companies where maybe you have to go find their app which as you know is not easy. With what we’re doing with text messaging, we’re making it very streamlined and simple. When they get that text, which everybody reads within the first five minutes, that link is there, so if they want to hit the link, they can donate or do a transaction right away. So it’s really a seamless process,” continued Lambrecht.
The Singlepoint Pay-by-Text™ combo of SMS and payments seems set for success. The Pew Research Center (http://nnw.fm/S7t7i) found that ‘some 83% of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages’. That was five years ago. The numbers are likely to be larger now.
Singlepoint’s Pay-by-Text™ solution allows merchants to offer a simplified mobile payment option to their customers’ mobile phones, letting customers pay at any time and from anywhere. Singlepoint can receive a monthly fee ranging from $10 – $100 depending on the merchant, and 1% of each transaction. The company recently integrated Pay-by-Text™ with the payment processor RedFynn Technologies, enabling Singlepoint to provide all forms of credit card processing.
For more information, visit the company’s website at www.Singlepoint.com
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