A lot of smaller establishments & professionals can’t afford to pay the high fees that credit card companies & banks charge for their cards, or they simply don’t allow electronic payments for a multitude of reasons. Now if you’re in France & want a secure & convenient way to transact payments without whipping out your credit card or cash, you can install this app ‘Lydia’ on your Android or Apple phone, & now even on your Apple watch.
Not only can merchants benefit from this innovative payment method, but you can pay a friend, your doctor or dentist, as well as an item on Craiglist. There are a number of competing payment apps like Venmo, Apple Pay or Android Pay, but unlike them, Lydia’s transactions are free & it uses standard credit card & debit card infrastructure to effect payments, without having to have the cards at hand.
You can pay a friend or another Lydia app user directly using QR codes, even if you don’t have a data connection, & the money will be credited straight to his Lydia account, which is housed in a major French bank. An SMS or email message informs them that the money is available for their use after a card number is input, in a link to a Web page that your app sends him. In fact, if you’re not a professional or vendor you don’t need to install the app at all to receive payments.
Of course, larger sized operations need to use the ‘Lydia Pro’ app or they can activate it on their PoS systems, which will take them a couple of minutes to set up in most cases. The latter do pay transaction fees credited to the payees, which is how Lydia makes its money, although at a cheaper rate than other transaction processors.
Other benefits of using Lydia are things like its inherent security, as your card numbers are not stored locally on your phone (they’re encrypted & stored in a 3rd party card payment broker), you need to type a PIN for every transaction & a secure token is generated every time. Also, data is completely confidential, as your bank data is never communicated to anyone, & the money in your account is available to you immediately upon receipt.
Lydia is a French company, & for now you can only opt in to this system in France.
Click here to download Lydia on your iOS device.
Click here to download Lydia on your Android device.
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. –
Image Credit: Lydia
