Intuit Wants to Cash-In on the iPhone

Posted Aug 26th 2010 12:30PM by Tom Taulli
Filed under: Intuit Inc (INTU), iPhone

Last week, Intuit (INTU) had its biggest one-day gain since 2001, with the stock surging about 15%. The reason was a strong earnings report, in which the company provided a bullish outlook as well as a $2 billion stock buyback. Even with the higher price, the momentum should continue.

After all, Intuit keeps innovating its product line -- and has the luxury of a hefty customer base. Just look at the company's latest offering: a complete credit card system for the iPhone. To pull this off, Intuit has teamed-up with mophie.

So with the new system, a small business can start accepting credit cards in as few as 15 minutes. Of course, the system integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks Mac.

And with mophie, there is a clip-on card reader, where a business owner can swipe a card and the customer will sign on the iPhone screen. This is important since credit card processing fees tend to be lower (as compared to entering the credit card number).

All in all, the Intuit offering is affordable, coming to $179.95. There is also a base monthly fee of $12.95 plus discount rates of 1.7% to 3.7% and transaction fees that range from $0.30 to $0.34.

Intuit realizes that more and more small business owners are on-the-go. So, being able to accept payments from the iPhone is certainly a big help -- and should be a nice long-term revenue stream.

Tom Taulli is also the author of several books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and also develops iPhone apps for finance.

Tags: credit card processing, inthenews, Intuit, iPhone, mophie