Mobile Credit Card Swiping Is Going Away

As I mentioned last week, swiping credit cards with dongles such as Square, Roam, and Intuit’s GoPayment is a short term fix for processing mobile political donations. A further nail in the swipe dongle coffin is Jumio's announcement that they raised $25.5 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz which puts their total raise at $32M.Jumio's strategy is to allow any cell phone with a camera to process a credit card transaction... no extra hardware required, no dongle, no NFC chip.Political campaigns can process online and mobile donations by having donors ‘swipe’ their credit cards using the webcam built into their phone. The mobile phone webcam uses a Jumio app which securely videostreams the credit card details for verification, no snapshot image is taken, no data is stored on the computer used for the payment, making the technology extremely secure. The product must work as they are on track to hit $100M in revenues this year.Jumio is not the only group taking this approach. Card.io, a SF startup is also making a play with very similar functionality.