Serve Partners with Verizon Wireless to Bring Simple and Easy Mobile Payments to Customers
Hello everyone — I’m really excited about today’s announcement that we’re now starting to work with Verizon to transform how people pay using their mobile phone number.
Firstly, Verizon has close to 100 million customers, and we are excited about the momentum and potential growth opportunity ahead – this is a major step in our work to get scale for the Serve platform. Serve will be preloaded on to many Verizon devices and we will work with them on marketing and merchandising plans to drive customer adoption.
Our strategy with Serve has been to provide a platform that is open, both in terms of funding sources and technologies. On day one, Serve enabled customers to use their Serve account to complete transactions in millions of online and offline merchants and use other services like P2P and the sales and fundraising apps.
This agreement is complementary to our open strategy and allows Verizon to begin providing mobile payments capabilities that have broad utility today and will evolve as POS technologies and customer behavior changes. Verizon is one of the members of ISIS and see this partnership as complementary to the NFC-based capabilities that ISIS will bring to the market over the next several years.
Until now, there have been a lot of limitations on people’s ability to make purchases by entering their mobile number and or billing purchases back to the carrier. We are changing all of this with Serve’s integration onto Verizon mobile phones. Available later this year, Verizon customers will be able to purchase virtual or physical items, of any price, in just a few clicks. We are able to do this with Verizon by integrating with the capabilities of Payfone – we made a strategic investment in this high-growth start-up earlier this year.
So for example, if I wanted to purchase a new pair of shoes on my mobile phone I will be able to simply provide my phone number and pin at checkout and have the payment rolled directly to my Serve account—eliminating the need to enter lengthy personal or financial information into my mobile’s tiny interface. The Serve mobile application will also be pre-loaded on many Verizon mobile phones, helping spread the word on Serve and our P2P services.
Mobile payments is growing fast – the number of consumers paying for items via their mobile devices will shoot past 141 million this year alone – and it’s important that Serve and American Express are able to provide these types of services to our customers. As part of our partnership with Verizon we also plan to move into mobile commerce with them, and will make it much easier for customers to cash in on special deals for goods and services by simplifying the sourcing, distribution and redemption of offers and promotions through their phones and the Serve platform.
For more details on this announcement check out the press release or visit serve.com/billmyphone for more details. All the best,
-David
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The Serve Team is focused on bringing you the best next generation digital payments and commerce platform for the future. Posts from the Serve Team are written by various employees covering a range of topics including product updates, partnerships and industry news.
