Take card payments on your Nokia with TaxiPay

Well this is rather neat.

A company by the name of Adelante is offering TaxiPay for mobile handsets. The service is targeted initially at Taxi Drivers who’d like to be able to take card payments with the minimum of fuss — it’s a really cool idea.

– It takes about a week to get setup with an account.
– You don’t need to have a merchant account. TaxiPay process the payments on your behalf — charging you for the privilege (6.5%) of course, but you can pass that on to the customers.
– The transaction details are encrypted
– Free to setup, you just pay as you go
– You’ve got to be a registered taxi driver to participate

It’s aimed at owner-drivers and I can see it being a total boon to them. It’s the sort of service I’d like to see more people having access to — so that when I get in the car and ask to be driven to [wherever] they can say yes and I can stick it on the company card. And avoid having to spend 20 minutes driving round looking for cashpoints.

I suspect that since it’s a Nokia handset in the demo, the service works for S60 devices.

It’d be rather interesting to see what would happen if this service was stuck on the iTunes App Store and made available to anyone who wanted to take card payments…

More details here: Adelante TaxiPay