LoopPay’s New Card Case: Brilliant or Just Loopy?
LoopPay, the transitional mobile payment technology launched last year at Money2020, is back at the big show in Vegas with an update to its form factor.
LoopPay utilizes a magnetic coil that communicates with magstripe readers to work at 90% of retail stores, according to CEO Will Graylin. Its form factors before yesterday were a keychain fob and a charge case designed for iPhones and the Samsung Galaxy.
Yesterday at Money2020 the company introduced a new case for the iPhone with a slot for a driver’s license and a backup payment card, as well as a detachable “card” that can be handed to waiters or drive-in clerks so they don’t have to take your phone away from you. (In utopian Europe, they bring the card reader to the table. They probably don’t go to drive-ins.) The idea behind LoopPay’s new device is a noble one — to truly allow the user to leave his wallet at home.
Why would Loop bother to introduce this new take on an old tech when new iPhones have NFC built in? And Apple Pay and Google Wallet aside, what about the move to EMV and chip-and-pin or ship-and-sig? Well, the company has some maneuvering to do, and Graylin made noise about APIs and moving deeper into digital yesterday, but for now, LoopPay’s play is ubiquity in the magstripe world, which may be around longer than anyone expects.
EMV and NFC aside, LoopPay is still falling short of where it wanted to be. Last April, Graylin told Bank Innovation that LoopPay would be inside a handset within the year. (The physical implementation is a small magnetic coil.) That doesn’t seem to have happened yet. He also mentioned partnership with Visa, and that happened. This summer Visa invested an undisclosed amount in the company, which has $13 million in total funding.
The new case costs $49.95 and works in concert with the mobile app to load payment cards — any card with a magstripe works, which is just about all of them. LoopPay does not provide any more data or context than traditional magstripe transactions, but it may add functionality to the app in future to help with this.
Many questions remain for LoopPay, and the company will need to make some shifts to stay relevant as payments move digital — but hey, it’s doing better than Coin.
