The U.S. mobile payments and marketing provider Spindle will add merchant-to-consumer credit services to its mobile offering via a strategic partnership with iPayMobile, a provider of merchant payment services.

The partnership will enable Spindle and its merchants to offer enhanced products and services to their customers at lower transaction costs, Andrew Ling, iPayMobil's president and CEO, said in a statement. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Spindle will be able to offer iPayMobil's micro-lending service via a free mobile app wallet linked to its existing mobile platform. The service will remove reliance on large service providers that charge higher fees and also look to acquire the customer, Ling said.

"The addition of the iPayMobil micro-lending service complements our broad m-commerce solution," Spindle CEO Bill Clark said. "Through this relationship, we can now offer an option for merchants to provide micro-lending services to customers while reducing their transaction and loan costs."

Also based in Scottsdale, iPayMobil is a supplier of SaaS (software as a service) mobile payment services, including consumer authentication and account validation, and mobile wallet data interchange with third-party providers.

As part of the agreement between the two companies, iPayMobil will license seven of its e-commerce patents to Spindle. These include patents for virtual currency and gaming, the processing of transactions by bridging customers and merchants within a network, micropayments, prepaid stored-value accounts and cloud services for digital content.

The iPayMobil micro-lending service is due to be released in the first quarter of 2014, and will be offered the 400,000 consumers using Spindle's MeNetwork mobile marketing platform. This will be followed by integration with the Yowza!! mobile marketing platform, which Spindle plans to acquire. Micro-loans will then be offered to the 1.4 million consumers who have already downloaded the Yowza!! application.

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