Global payment gateway giant Square has announced the expansion of its Tap to Pay service to Android devices in the UK to help more businesses accept payments more fluidly, with a clear focus on small-scale companies and pop-ups.
The service works through the company’s Point of Sale, Appointments, Invoices, or Restaurants apps, and supports payments from contactless debit and credit cards as well as digital wallets like Google Pay.
Beyond running at least Android 9 on a compatible device with NFC capabilities, Tap to Pay eliminates the need to carry around extra hardware and comes for free as part of existing plans.
Square Tap to Pay for Android
Emphasizing the service’s security, Square explains that no card numbers are stored on merchants’ phones and Tap to Pay benefits from the rest of Square’s security measures.
General manager for the company’s POS division, Alexis Sowa, detailed the company’s intentions: “Square’s goal is to make sure that our sellers, no matter where they are or who they are serving, never miss a sale.”
Sowa continues: “Even though Tap to Pay technology has only been available for a short time, the breadth of applications and use cases we’re seeing across our seller base already reinforce its staying power.”
Square isn’t the only company playing with mobile payment technology; Apple announced Tap to Pay on iPhone last year in the US though a wider rollout has been slow. Some other companies, like Stripe, have already made use of the technology, too.
Square Tap to Pay for Android is available to businesses in the US, UK, Australia, Ireland, France, and Spain, which builds on the company’s existing offering on iOS counterparts which debuted late last year in the US only. TechRadar Pro has asked Square about plans to expand Tap to Pay for iPhone to more markets, but the company did not immediately respond.
