VeriFone today released Way2Ride, a new app that lets New York City taxi passengers pay by smarthphone. The app works with iOS and Android phones and allows users to preset payment preferences, the preferred card, tip percentage and how they'd like to receive their receipt, according to a company announcement.

Once inside the cab, passengers can pay at any time with a tap of their phone. Digital receipts are stored in the app and accessible at Way2ride.com for easy tagging and expensing of business trips.

"Way2ride makes every taxi ride better, whether you hail by hand or with an app," Amos Tamam, senior vice president of Taxi Systems for VeriFone, said in a news release. "An app that provides this convenience in every taxi in New York City, including the new for-hire vehicles in upper Manhattan and the boroughs, will be a real benefit to passengers and drivers alike."

After the New York launch, VeriFone said it will expand Way2ride acceptance throughout its network of more than 70,000 payment-enabled taxis worldwide.

Way2ride uses VeriFone's Zoosh sound-based technology to check passengers into their ride, the company said, allowing for secure transmission of payment information through the cloud. And the new app represents VeriFone's first commercial deployment of Zoosh technology, which utilizes the speakers and microphones of smartphones to securely exchange encrypted data between devices, allowing app developers to unlock the potential of non-NFC smartphones to deliver single-tap functionality alongside their NFC solutions, according to the release.

Way2ride is built on VeriFone's open API cloud platform, which enables developers to easily create apps with secure payment, messaging and other value-added services leveraging VeriFone's secure mobile commerce network, the company said. VeriFone's open API cloud platform currently supports taxi and for-hire vehicle implementations (for example, in-taxi interactions). Future releases will address additional verticals, such as petroleum (such as interactions in the C-store and at the pump).

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