NCR doesn’t have any products that reach down into the mobile payment market currently but it has carved out a team of 150 employees to tackle this opportunity. It’s hoping it can rely on its history of handling secure payments, its experience in providing back-end support and its ability to help merchants grow into more products.

NCR Silver starts with a mobile card reader and an iPhone app that connects to an online dashboard, where users can track inventory,  profits and losses and run customer relationship management and email marketing. The system scales up with an iPad app, that comes with a stand and connects to an NCR wireless receipt printer and cash drawer. The full hardware package minus the iPad can be had for $619. Users will pay $79 a month to connect a mobile device and up to $29 a month each for additional devices. For the first 1,000 customers of NCR Silver, they’ll pay $39 a month for the life of the business.

Like VeriFone, Intuit, PayAnywhere and PayPal, NCR sees an opportunity to use mobile devices to appeal to small business owner. And they’re all hoping they can rely on their existing expertise and assets to cut Square off as it goes after larger merchants. Despite its 128-year heritage, NCR isn’t a name that most small merchants have much familiarity with, so it will be a challenge to market the product to businesses that are getting hit up by a number of services.

But the company, which processes $2.4 trillion annually and did $5.6 billion of revenue last year, has a broad network of financial institutions and merchant services providers, who will be able to sell NCR Silver to business owners. And NCR also believes that it can win over merchants with things like live 24/7 customer service, something Square doesn’t currently havem and overnight hardware replacement. Combined with its suite of software services, NCR believes it can cut down on the complexity many merchants face in running their businesses.

“We see our sweet spot as people who want a cash register but they want to be mobile too, they want something integrated,” said Christian Nahas, vice president of NCR’s small and medium business team. “We aren’t just about payments or gathering data, it’s about impacting the lives of small business owners.”

NCR will likely compete more closely with Intuit, which recently combined its QuickBooks Point of Sale product with its GoPayment mobile payment service. That allowed the 200,000 customers who use QuickBooks POS hardware and software to add mobile payments. But the QuickBooks POS will start at $1,099 for a basic version of the software and $1,499 for the pro version.

Nahas said there are 4 million small business owners that can use NCR’s products. He’s hoping the company can grab 20 percent of that market. NCR, however, still lacks some pieces that many merchants might want. There’s not much in the way of bringing in new customers through offers or ads. And the service is only geared toward iOS for now.

But NCR Silver gives businesses another option to turn to and provides some features that appeal to many merchants like familiar cash registers, live customer support and end-to-end encryption of payments. This is just going to be make it harder for Square to move up market though as its COO Keith Rabois told me, there’s still a huge $22 billion opportunity in going after companies with less than 20 employees. We’ll see if it can support an increasingly crowded field of competitors.

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Paypal's VP of mobile, David Marcus

Today was PayPal’s chance to share with the world that it could provide some serious competition to the startup payment processor Square, with its own mobile-centric dongle for accepting credit card payments on the go.

We already knew the rough details of what it was announcing: that PayPal would come to market with a portable card reader for accepting credit card payments on the go. Today’s press conference was all about showing how PayPal, late to the game in some respects, would beat Square, the smaller but more nimble startup in the mobile payments space.

Did it succeed?

A lot of PayPal’s messaging was about its existing dominance in the merchant services business and in mobile payments. Prior to the start of the press conference, the company replayed an impressive array of stats over and over before the media audience. For instance:

• PayPal hit $4 billion in payments on mobile devices in 2011
• PayPal is expected to beat $7 billion in mobile payments in 2012.
• PayPal had more than 17 million active mobile users, compared to 8 million in June.
• Merchant services total payment volume was $22 billion in the fourth quarter 2011, up 29 percent year-over-year
• Its merchant services accounted for 66 percent of PayPal’s total payment volume, with $77 billion precessed in 2011. That’s up 36 percent year-over-year.
• PayPal adds more than 1 million consumers a month, with more than 100 million accounts worldwide.

But move past the numbers and the highlight of the presentation was the card reader and availability of mobile apps — one for businesses and one for consumers — that are designed to allow PayPal merchants to get payment for objects and service online and offline.

The card reader itself is about what you’d expect: It has a triangle shape (in contrast to the Square reader), and allows merchants to swipe and get payments immediately. But where PayPal’s pitch shines is in its ability to allow PayPal Here merchants to accept payments for goods whether the sale happens in person or from online inventory. Frankly, that gives a lot of flexibility that Square can’t offer today.

The PayPal Here app also looks pretty slick, and allows for transactions beyond just swiping a credit card. It also allows them to take a picture and scan a credit card when the reader isn’t available thanks to Card.io, or scan a check and receive instant credit. And finally, merchants can also keep track of cash transactions. They can charge instantly using the “Simple” interface, or can create an inventory of products and services to add to a transaction, and even send an invoice to customers.

Merchants will be charged a flat 2.7 percent fee for all transactions, which is slightly lower than Square’s 2.75 percent. But it’s trying to sweeten the deal for merchants by offering instant access to all funds and a debit card that will enable merchants to take cash out. Also, that debit card will offer 1 percent cash back on all purchases, which PayPal says can bring the effective rate to 1.7 percent for those who use PayPal’s merchant service and debit card.

Finally, PayPal is releasing an updated consumer app that will allow users to know where local PayPal merchants using the app and card reader are available. Through the app, users will be able to notify merchants that they’re on their way.

But will this all resonate with its merchants, and with users? PayPal is hoping to draw on the more than 100 million users worldwide it has registered, and said it will be aggressively pushing updates to the consumer app, as well as making thousands of PayPal Here readers available to merchants. The service starts today with select merchants in the US, Hong Kong, Canada and Australia and will expand soon to other countries.

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