PayRange intros simplest payment solution for machines

PORTLAND, USA: PayRange, a turnkey mobile payment system, was announced today at PYMNTS Innovation Project 2014, held at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

The PayRange system includes Blukey hardware, a mobile app and service, and is poised to be the world's simplest payment solution for machines.

Paresh Patel, PayRange founder and CEO, introduced the payment solution for the first time to a crowd of 600 invitation-only, senior executives from the payment industry. Until then, PayRange Inc. had been operating in "stealth-mode" under the code name VendNext.

With initial development complete, Patel shared the good news with the audience: Installing PayRange "... is as easy as plugging a USB thumb drive into a computer. It takes just 30 seconds and no tools are required. The BluKey device works with virtually any vending machine made in the last 15 years, plus millions of other kinds of machines."

Patel went on to explain that consumers maintain a prepaid balance on their smart phones, which can be used to make payments to a variety of machines including vending, parking, transit ticketing, laundry and more.

When users are in "PayRange"-or about arm's length from the machine-they receive an alert and can then immediately "swipe" their finger on their smartphone's touchscreen to send payment to the machine via a Bluetooth LE connection.

The PayRange mobile app will be available in April for the iPhone, and late summer for Android.

While mobile payment is certainly a hot space for developers, Patel differentiates PayRange by focusing on unattended points-of-sale. "We believe mobile payment traction will occur first in markets where mobile displaces cash, because that is where the most pain is for users," says Patel.

"More specifically, cash payment on machines is unreliable with frequent jams, untrustworthy with ‘eating-money' mishaps, and inconvenient requiring change and/or specific denominations of bills."