By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
Updated 14h 26m ago
A 128-year-old company just plunged into the fledgling mobile-payment market.
NCR, which has made cash registers for more than a century, this week debuted NCR Silver, a service that lets merchants ring up sales -- and later analyze that data -- on iPads and iPhones.
"We're bringing our big-business know-how to small business," says Christian Nahas, vice president of NCR's small and medium business team.
The vulnerable technology company joins a growing list of smartphone-based, point-of-sale products pioneered by Square. The crowd of competitors includes Google, PayPal and Intuit.
"Square is getting tightly boxed in," says Rakesh Agrawal, principal analyst at reDesign Mobile. "NCR has better channels. Great defensive move on their part."
Like those services, NCR is giving merchants a free app to process and track customer payments.
The company doesn't provide a free card reader to its customers. It charges merchants $79 for a credit card reader, or $549 for a device that scans barcodes and reads credit cards. It also sells an "iPad register bundle," which comes with a card reader, cash drawer and receipt printer for $619.
Merchants also pay a $79 monthly fee for every iPhone and iPad they use as a register. The first 1,000 merchants to sign up for Silver pay $39 a month for the life of their business.
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