Bling Nation Raises $20 Million For Cell Phone Payment System

What recession? Startup Bling Nation just raised $20 million in Series B funding from Balderton Capital for a new cell phone payment system. This brings the startup’s total funding to $33 million since its launch in 2007.

Bling Nation’s ambitions are to establish a revolutionary and comprehensive payments system for physical goods. Here’s how it works. The company partners with local banks in super small communities in the U.S. (where the prominent bank isn’t Citibank or Bank of America). Banks will then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment.

Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special “Bling Nation” credit card machines that will scan the chips. The payment device will calculate the number of times a payee has made a transaction and as an added bonus, will automatically award the user with coupons, points or discounts, which the merchant determines. The device will read the chip and deduct the money for a purchase out of the payee’s bank account. Bling Nation even allows merchants to implement a security feature, in which upon purchase, the customer will have to enter a PIN code for larger transactions.

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Tags: cell phone payments, new payment system, revolutionary payment system

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Consider This, Finance, Innovation, Shape of Things to Come?, TechCrunch, disruptive innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.