Ever have just one item you needed to pick up at the store? You’re in a huge rush, but when you go to checkout, all the cash registers are backed up with lines and lines of people.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to just scan the item with your phone and head out the door? The team at CashKey, Inc. thinks that sounds easier too, and they’re aiming cut down on wait time with their new mobile app Fastlane.io.
Built out of their own frustration with checkout hassles, fastlane.io is an ultra secure mobile app used by merchants as a point-of-sale service for its customers. CashKey, Inc. already has an app called CashKey, an app similar to Park Genius, that allows people to pay for parking meters through their phone; and the team is now extending to in-store and online merchandise payments with Fastlane.io. It’s in its infancy, but now that the team has joined Tallwave’s early stage company mentorship program, High Tide, the app could be reaching merchants on a larger scale.
Kaufman could not provide names just yet, but the team already has merchants signed up for the service. They are also in talks of various distribution methods of their product (which could include banks), and they already have a partnership with the largest credit card processor in the U.S.
The Fastlane.io product focuses on two important things: safeguarding payments against fraud and saving you time by paying for those few items faster.
Self-checkout is just one of Fastlane.io’s features, but here’s how it works: When a customer makes a purchase at a participating location, they scan their item, confirm payment and an alert is sent to the merchant that a purchase was just made. Granted a person is available to help, they’ll bag your items and off you go. The team’s YouTube video demonstrates the process:
[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://youtu.be/0NPZ1h6wEnQ[/youtube]
Customers can also use Fastlane.io to make purchases online or through QR code, and can expect coming features like buying items through TV ads and geolocation.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk01V4Sew4I[/youtube]
When a customer uses fastlane.io, their credit cards are stored in an encrypted form, and it stays only in the application. The app’s feature, Transaction Armor, maintains that card’s safety by not exposing it to a merchant’s system at point of sale.
“The three methods that people use to hack cards is if you give your card to a merchant, if it’s swiped through a terminal, and the other, the biggest there is, is a lot of merchants just store the credit cards,” said Kaufman, making an example of Target’s credit card breach last year that affected 40 million customers.
According to a report by Bloomberg Businessweek, hackers installed malware into Target’s system, allowing them to steal a card’s number whenever it was swiped at checkout.
And some customers might think having a store hold their credit card information is helpful, but it can make theft that much easier.
“A lot of people think that’s a convenience,” Kaufman said of stores keeping card numbers on file, “but obviously when your card is hacked, you lose your credit card, you have to wait [to get a new one], and you don’t know…what other personal information they may have obtained.”
The app is available for free on iOS.
To read more AZ Tech Beat stories about Tallwave click here.
Images provided by Lance Kaufman
