Electronic payments company PowerPay has partnered with Transaction Wireless, a mobile payments and marketing company, to enable credit card payments via the mobile Web.

Mobile payments service providers have been cropping up left and right, and this announcement is yet another indication that the mobile payments space will have a big year in 2010. The partnership enables PowerPay to offer Transaction Wireless’s wCharge Credit Card Terminal to its customers.

“We are the bridge between the mobile world and the processor world for companies looking to process transactions via mobile on the road,” said Bruce Springer, CEO of Transaction Wireless, San Diego. “We allow merchants to provide real-time transaction services to their customers wherever they happen to be.

“They don’t have the ability to connect to all of these carriers and handsets that we do, so they’re bundling our services for their merchant providers,” he said.

PowerPay’s ecommerce and point-of-sale payment-processing clients include Time-Warner Cable, California Internet Service Providers Assocation, Disk.com, Infusionsoft, Cesari Direct and On-Line Technologies.

Transaction Wireless is a mobile commerce, payments and marketing company linking consumers, retailers and brands via mobile devices. Its product portfolio includes a small merchant mobile point-of-sale credit card terminal—wCharge—and mobile gift cards—wGiftCard.

Mobile PowerPlay
Under the agreement, PowerPay’s customers will gain access to Transaction Wireless’s mobile-Web-based platform, turning any mobile phone into a credit card terminal without extra equipment, allowing merchants of all sizes to accept payments virtually anywhere.

Through this partnership, PowerPay customers gain value by combining the Transaction Wireless point-of-sale credit card terminal with a PowerPay account, offering savings on processing fees, which directly affect the bottom line of any small business.

Transaction Wireless’s mobile POS solution will extend the functionality of a PowerPay merchant account to any mobile phone, letting merchants process payments in real time at a trade show, at home or anywhere business can be conducted.

“We’re integrating their back-end with our application, and when they enroll a merchant, they set that merchant up on wCharge, so their client can use our application to process credit card transactions through our back-end,” Mr. Springer said.

“Our application is tied to the merchant, and PowerPay offers every credit card that’s out there,” he said. “PowerPay is going to enroll you as a merchant in their program—they are going to offer the mobile solution to their customer.

“They send us the data for us to set up a wCharge account with that mobile number, and we then distribute the app to that consumer to turn it on,” he said.

To make a transaction, the merchant opens the application, manually enters in the consumer’s credit card number and expiration date, then they can send them an email receipt or an SMS receipt.

“We now have an instantaneous open direct connection between our app and PowerPay’s back-end, so we can provide instant authorization for that credit card transactions,” Mr. Springer said.

PowerPay supports all major credit and debit cards, electronic benefits transfer (EBT), government purchase cards, petroleum cards, loyalty cards, gift cards and recurring bill payment with applications suiting a variety of needs.

By adding the wCharge terminal to its offerings, PowerPay customers can take advantage of mobile technology to provide a new real-time payment option to their customers.

“We built the wCharge app to enable mobile technology for the payments industry,” Mr. Springer said. “WCharge is deployed by AT&T Media Mall, Verizon Get It Now and V Cast, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry App World.

“We work with flip phones, smartphones, any phone that is out there, and we have a WAP site,” he said. “We have also distributed our app with PayPal.”