The electronic payment vendor Cyphermint Inc. has developed a mobile payment system linked to its prepaid cards.
People can use PayCash Mobile to initiate payments with any Internet-capable devices, such as cell phones and computers, Cyphermint said. It can also be used from PayCash kiosks.
The Marlborough, Mass., company announced PayCash Mobile on Monday. It plans to expand the service in October by allowing people to fund the accounts from other credit and debit cards.
Joe Barboza, Cyphermint's president and chief executive, said that though the initial focus is on enabling people to use the service to pay for goods and services, "we believe that the real market is in person-to-person transfers."
PayCash Mobile can be used only to send money to a maximum of 10 payees on a user-created list of merchants or friends.
The 10-payee limit was set to make the tracking of payments easier, in part to comply with the USA Patriot Act, Mr. Barboza said. It will be raised if the service becomes more widely used, he said.
There are 6 million PayCash users, Mr. Barboza said. Consumers and merchants must have PayCash accounts to receive payments and must pay a 2% fee to do so.
Cyphermint's service enters a nascent but increasingly heated landscape for mobile payments. Pay-Pal Inc. recently brought its service to mobile phones and is marketing both the person-to-person function and a system letting users of mobile phones buy items advertised with a PayPal Text-to-Buy logo. PayPal, of San Jose, is a unit of eBay Inc.
Other rivals include OboPay Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., and Vayusa Inc. of Newton, Mass., which offers a service called MobileLime. Banks and mobile phone carriers are testing versions that combine mobile phone hardware with contactless cards.
