Swiff: One More Square-like Payment Solution Launches in Asia

We wrote about Swiff a couple of months ago, and perhaps a few of you were curious to hear more about it. We just learned that the mobile payment device has now officially launched today.

In short, Swiff is a Square-like payment solution. Swiff provides a credit/debit card reader device that is connected to the audio port of your phone making payment accessible anywhere. It works on most mobile devices: iOS, Blackberry, Android, and soon on Windows Phones.

It’s a much welcome launch given that Square hasn’t been made available in Asia yet. It is also important to note that while Square can be used by anyone, including freelancers, Swiff is focused only on verified business accounts. The device encrypts and transmits card data to the banks without storing any information on the mobile device.

The payment authentication is done at four levels: the consumer, the consumer’s device, the merchant, and the merchant’s device. The solution looks pretty neat as you can see in the video below. But Swiff isn’t alone in Asia. Paypal recently launched ‘PayPal Here.’ While Alipay also has its own mobile credit card reader, though it doesn’t look much like Square, but more like a normal point-of-sales device we see everyday in the supermarket.