Flint Mobile Payments Adds Invoicing & Online Bill Pay to Android Devices
The quest for cornering the mobile payments market is one pursued by plenty of players. From PayPal to Square to even Google, there seems to be no shortage of companies who want to help you spend money or to help you take money from other spenders. Today, Flint Mobile has announced the latest weapons in its arsenal: now the company will allow users to send out invoices and provide online bill pay to customers.
As we’ve heard before, Flint Mobile already has a pretty decent trick up its sleeve in its competition with the likes of Square. Rather than rely on a card reader dongle that plugs into a device’s headphone jack, Flint allows users to simply snap photos of customers’ credit cards to handle payments easily and securely. As long as your device has a built-in camera and a connection to the Internet, you’re good to go.
Today’s announcement brings the full suite of functionality to the company’s Android app. According to the press release published today, Flint for Android can now generate invoices quickly and easily, and then gives recipients of those invoices the easy option of paying with the click of a button. This takes out the need to set up e-commerce infrastructure on the part of the merchant, since the app is linked directly to the user’s bank account. All told, this seems to lower the barriers between merchants and customers, and makes everything much easier for everyone involved. The Android app will also be able to handle cash and check transactions, so it seems as though Flint is pulling out all the stops here.
Flint has had invoicing and online bill pay in place for iOS for some time now, and this latest announcement simply ensures that the Android app can keep up with its longer-lived iOS cousin. And since Android is the most widely used mobile OS currently on the market, chances are good that this new feature could do wonders for bringing in more users from the very visible Square payment app. Of course, who knows when the next payment app will come around and change the game again?