Spindle is Changing the Way Consumers Shop

Spindle is a mobile commerce company that is helping to change the way consumers shop. In an interview with TMC’s (News - Alert) Rachel Ramsey at ITEXPO Miami, Bill Clark, CEO of Spindle, said shopping will become safer, more productive and provide more value as far as interactions.

Now, the company provides mobile marketing, advertising, mobile commerce via payments, and transaction processing, Clark said. “Really putting together a complete solution including point of sale processing, point of sale equipment, and…outreach to consumers in a single package,” Clark adds.

When it comes to mobile commerce, Clark envisions what mobile could be in the future. “Not the idea that we’re simply taking credit card information and putting it into a phone and using it for point of sale – but what can mobile really do for us in the future,” Clark said.

“The concept that we are promoting really is personal point of sale,” he added, “your cell phone becomes the point of sale; rather than walking into the store and using it to interact with an existing point of sale, you do your checkout as you progress through the store.” Clark explains this is a concept, not yet fully in the market, but the company had demonstrations of its future ideas at its booth during ITEXPO (News - Alert).

“We really think that mobile changes the way we all do business, the way we interact,” Clark said.

Spindle recently acquired Yowza – one of three companies within a year. Two of them are involved with mobile marketing and coupons. The Yowza acquisition gave Spindle 2 million consumers and 95,000 merchant locations. “That’s really for us a way of entering the market more directly,” he said. “We now have a good base of customers to begin to drive mobile commerce solutions holistically into the market.”

In addition, when it comes to the machine-to-machine (M2M) sector, Spindle has some related vending solutions. And when it comes to the pressing issue of security, Clark explains there are two issues: security and authentication. “We a lot of times try to secure payment information,” he said, “while at the same time we have never done any work to validate … or authenticate them as the person that that is supposed to be using the payment account. With mobile we can accomplish both.” In fact, in a fully authenticated mobile payment, the now famous recent breach at Target (News - Alert) would never have happened. The card data would not have been present in the merchant’s system.