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With the rise of Zelle, PayPal, and Square, we’ve entered a new era of payments. But the challenge is making these payments as secure and fast as they are convenient. To make this a reality, payment providers are turning to technology companies to help them meet increasing consumer expectations and diverse use cases.

Ultrasonic data technology is emerging as the leading solution to enable secure and fast payments, from peer to peer and beyond. Previously we’ve discussed pain points for mobile payment providers and today we’re going to go over the key questions payment providers need to address when implementing a new technology into their stack.

What Encryption Method Do You Use?

Data can be vulnerable if security isn’t a priority. And this is simply unacceptable when it comes to payment transfers. Encryption is key to keeping customer financial information safe in payments. Either industry standard protections are put into place or the risk of fraud is much higher. Luckily, LISNR supports a variety of encryption methods.

Payment providers working with LISNR encrypt payment data and include it as the payload they send. This allows them to support industry standard security seamlessly. LISNR makes it easy to decrease fraud by enabling payment providers to use our tones for time-based security mechanisms, or reducing the volume of the tone to make malicious recording less likely.

Do You Have a Gateway?

A gateway is a service that processes debit and credit card transactions for a business, such as PayPal or Square. LISNR’s role in the payment process precedes the gateway step, which means payment providers can use their gateway of choice as usual. For example, if a retailer were to implement LISNR technology at checkout, we would send data to the merchant or payment terminal before they communicate with the specific gateway they use. LISNR’s ultrasonic data technology makes it unnecessary to insert an EMV chip card or place a smartphone near an NFC reader to initiate a payment.

How Do You Improve my Current Solution?

LISNR’s main points of differentiation for payment providers are cost reduction and platform diversity. As a payment provider, you want your customers to have a smooth experience and this is impossible when you’re adding unneeded hardware to the payment process. Instead, LISNR utilizes speakers and microphones embedded in standard hardware that payment providers already rely on. This cuts costs and also simplifies the customer experience.

In addition, with an ever increasing number of mobile wallets, you won’t have to be tied down to one platform. LISNR is device and platform agnostic, which is rare in an industry where only Apple products can use Apple Pay and only Androids can use Google Pay.

What Devices Do You Support?

Supporting a wide range of devices means that a technology solution can help with countless use cases. Here are the devices that LISNR currently supports.

  • Android 4.4+
  • iOS 8+
  • macOS 10.10+
  • Windows
    • Vista+
    • 32-bit
    • 64-bit
  • Linux
    • Debian 9 (Stretch) (x86)
    • Ubuntu 18.04 (x86)
    • Raspbian Stretch (armv7)
  • Raspberry Pi
    • Raspberry Pi 2
    • Raspberry Pi 3
    • Raspberry Pi 3+

What Distance Can You Restrict the Tone Down to?

Distance is an important part of a flexible solution. This is especially true when it comes to payments because users don’t want to send money to the wrong person or pay for someone else’s basket accidentally in the grocery store. Payments solutions need to be close range to be effective and facilitate safe and accurate payments.

The specific distance LISNR can restrict our tones to is dependent on volume and profile type. We have three tone profiles: Standard (18.75 – 19.2kHz), Compression (14.55 – 15kHz), and Precision Kilo Audio Bit (PKAB, 18 – 19.2kHz). Standard is used for long distance data transmission, such as checking shoppers into a large retailer’s loyalty app. And Compression was designed for use cases like FM radio audio streaming that involve getting through filters that remove sound at the frequency that Standard and PKAB use.

When payment providers want to help friends pay each other when the bill comes at a restaurant, distance and precision are key. That’s what makes our PKAB solution a great fit for payment providers. This tone is short range and can send a high quantity of encrypted data in a single tone.

While distance is quite important, it is still important to note that optimal distance and tone profile depend on each specific payments use case.

So there you have the most common questions payment providers need the answers to when deciding on a new technology. Want to learn more? Get in touch to connect with our team and explore how ultrasonic data transmission can revolutionize the way your company facilitates payments.

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