Visa just invested in a fintech that wants to eliminate checkout hardware, and it's a peek into the future of how we'll pay for things
Visa is investing in MagicCube, a payments-security fintech focused on enabling devices like smartphones to accept payments.
Inside any point-of-sale device — be it a sleek Square terminal, traditional Verifone keypad, and even a kiosk at a movie theater — there are expensive and bulky security measures built into the hardware. From various security chips and even a gold-mesh layer under the keypad to prevent tampering, there are limitations to the actual hardware required to process payments.
Shawki, who was previously head of remote payments at Visa, left the card giant in 2014 to build MagicCube. His co-founder and wife, Nancy Zayed, is the fintech's CTO and was formerly an engineer at Apple. "We basically built something that can replace a SIM card or a chip or a payment device. These are all physical containers, like a physical safe you have at home," Shawki said.
"When we started to pitch this as pure security for cars, we had a few projects with the likes of Honda and others, but none of them were ready and eager to use us commercially like Visa and Mastercard were," Shawki said.MagicCube isn't the only one eyeing software-based payments, which enables iPhones to become payment-accepting devices.
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