Verizon Wireless and Intuit Inc. announced today that Intuits's GoPayment mobile point-of-sale application and credit card reader will be available through Verizon Wireless' 2,300 retail stores and business-to-business sales channels.

The GoPayment app lets small businesses process credit and debit card transactions on smartphones and tablets. The app works on Android, BlackBerry and iOS devices.

"Payments and transactions are often the biggest hurdle businesses face," said Mike Schaefer, executive director of Verizon Wireless' Business Solutions Group. "Our value proposition is to streamline, simplify and enable business owners to get paid with minimal delay."

Along with processing payments, the GoPayment app also offers merchants the ability to speed transactions by creating a list of frequently sold items, apply sales tax, add gratuities and send an email receipt to customers.

According to the announcement, the GoPayment tool fully protects customer data by encrypting the data through the reader as well when the data is processed through the application, and customer data is never stored on the mobile device.

The credit card reader is free to Verizon Wireless customers with the activation of a GoPayment account and a mail-in rebate. It is free to download the GoPayment app, but merchants are charged a 2.7 percent fee for any swiped transaction. Intuit offers a paid version of the service for $12.95 per month that offers a lower transaction fee of 1.7 percent.

For more stories on this topic, please visit our POS research center.