Bling Nation raises $8M for cell phone payment system
There's something cool about buying stuff in stores with your cell phone. They do it in Europe and Asia, so why not here? Bling Nation has come up with a way to introduce pay-by-cellphone transactions in the U.S. for the purchase of physical goods at stores.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mobile point-of-sale payments have been a slow build in VentureBeat's coverage: Danal launched its own mobile payments company back in June 2007, and two years on Bling Nation is the next funded entrant, taking $8M to attack the same gap. Its pitch mirrors what the article describes as routine in Europe and Asia — tapping a phone at a store register for physical goods — applied to a U.S. retail base where that behavior hasn't taken hold.
The raise matters because it is venture capital betting on a startup-built answer rather than waiting on banks or carriers to standardize: Bling Nation now has capital to sign merchants while the field remains fragmented between early movers like Danal and itself.
First-order effects
- The $8M gives Bling Nation the runway to recruit U.S. merchants onto its phone-at-register payment scheme, offering stores a new tender option for physical goods alongside cash and cards.
- Consumers in markets where Bling Nation deploys gain a way to pay in person with a device they already carry, without the bank-led infrastructure the European and Asian models rely on.
Second-order effects
- Bling Nation's arrival puts it in direct competition with earlier startup entrants like Danal for merchant signings and consumer adoption, splitting a nascent U.S. market across incompatible schemes.
- Merchants and payment acquirers face a choice between backing an unproven mobile tender now or ceding the checkout experience to whichever scheme reaches scale first — a decision that pressures incumbents to accelerate their own mobile plans.
Third-order effects
- If funded entrants keep arriving faster than any single standard emerges, U.S. point-of-sale payments fragment across rival phone-based schemes until merchant demand forces interoperability or consolidates the field around one winner.
The trend: U.S. retail payments are entering a venture-funded mobile phase, with startups like Danal and Bling Nation building parallel phone-payment schemes years ahead of any bank- or carrier-led standard.