Payment via camera phone: 2 opposite options

This week 2 new products using camera: Flint and Malauzai. 2 opposite options: you take the picture of your card or you take the picture of your bill.

How Flint works: using the Flint iPhone app, a merchant takes a photo of the portion of the customer's credit card number; Flint's proprietary optical character recognition converts the image snippet to machine-readable text. The image snipped and number are encrypted. The customer types in the card expiration date and CVV code. The customer can also type in their email address to receive an emailed receipt. The merchant can type in a special offer or a note about the transaction or customer for future reference. The transaction is processed by Vantiv; Visa and MasterCard debit and credit cards are accepted. Debit card transactions, at 1.95% plus 20 cents, are cheaper thanSquare's flat 2.75% fee for all transactions. Flint credit card transactions are more costly at 2.95% plus 20. Flint also aims to help merchants attract customers through social media: the emailed receipt contains a link to a tool the customer can use to recommend the merchant on Facebook.

How Malauzai works: Picture Pay™, developed in conjunction with Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Allied Payment Network, allows users to complete a payment in three simple steps: take a photo of the bill statement, confirm the amount to be paid and submit the payment to the financial institution. Optical character recognition (OCR) technology reads the data from the statement and built-in analytics confirm biller information.