But Greg Golebiewski, the founder and CEO of a micropayment provider, thinks this conventional wisdom is wrong, and that media companies are missing a lucrative opportunity.

Golebiewski’s company is called Znak It, and he says he has spent the past five years or so trying to convince publishers and media companies of all kinds that they should at least experiment with micropayments — and that they could actually make more from such a model than they do from a paywall, while also attracting new readers who might never get beyond the subscription barrier. But with only a handful of clients using his system, most of them located in eastern Europe, the Znak It founder is still very much a lonely voice crying in the media wilderness.

“I’ve been trying to sell this idea for the past five years — it’s extremely difficult to break that notion, the theory that micropayments don’t sell. [Critics] don’t have any data, it’s just conventional wisdom or common knowledge, but it’s very difficult to go to them and say we have a flexible system for payments and then when they figure out it’s micropayments, they stop listening.”

Micropayments equal being “nickel and dimed”

The idea that micropayments are unworkable for content stems in part from a piece by media theorist Clay Shirky in 2009, in which he said that users “don’t like being nickel and dimed.” The psychological friction created by this perception, he said, meant that very few people would go through with a micropayment for content. Suggestions that Bitcoins (as described recently by Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners) or some other system could make the idea more feasible are routinely dismissed by media-industry insiders.

Golebiewski, however, says that his research shows that when given a choice between a paywall or micropayments, readers are overwhelmingly in favor of paying for specific pieces of content rather than signing up for a monthly or annual subscription plan — and that this is particularly true for younger users, who are often thought to be opposed to paying for content online.

Znak It published a white paper last year (PDF link) based on the results of five pilot projects involving a variety of different kinds of media such as videos, music and text content. Out of a total of 43,000 unique users there were 1,281 buyers and the largest single group was 18-24 years of age, although that number could be skewed because music was part of the trial. In that age category, as many as 5 percent of the unique users wound up becoming buyers (paywalls usually get about one percent conversion).

Part of the problem for Golebiewski and Znak It is the chicken-and-egg factor: there are so few companies using micropayments that it’s difficult to come up with any comprehensive research to prove that they work. Znak It’s white paper is based on such a small sample size that it’s hard to use it as an argument for why the New York Times or another newspaper should go with the micropayment model. But the Znak It founder is adamant that publishers need to try it, if only to increase their reach.

This is a challenge that I discussed in a recent post — the idea that paywalls are good for monetizing your existing readers, but not particularly good for encouraging new readers (apart from the occasional dropping of the wall for breaking-news purposes). Part of Golebiewski’s point is that allowing readers to pay for a single article encourages browsing, which makes it more likely someone will convert into a regular paying customer.

Micropayments aren’t a quick fix

The Znak It founder admits that he has so far only had success with a few eastern European media companies — including a national weekly publication in Poland (where Golebiewski is from) and some small newspapers in other countries — and blames this on the deep-seated dislike of micropayments in North America.

“We started in some of the countries in eastern Europe and elsewhere that were a bit more responsive to our ideas — a bit more desperate if you will. It was easier to go to those smaller countries and start there, they’re a little more open to experiment — they don’t have the big brands and massive traffic, so they are a little bit more receptive.”

The company’s system has two different models: in one, users create accounts with Znak-It and can then use its payment process with any site that supports it, while the second is an “earn free access” option in which advertisers subsidize access for readers who provide some kind of information or engage in some kind of task — such as reading through an ad or filling out a survey. Part of the challenge for Znak It as a small provider is signing up enough clients to make it worthwhile to have an account there (Google has also experimented with micropayments via Google Wallet, and has a “survey wall” service as well).

Despite his lack of substantial progress, however, Golebiewski says he remains convinced that some form of micropayments has to be part of the future of media and content online, since subscription models are only going to appeal to small sub-segment of the total population:

“Many publishers are looking for a quick fix, and I don’t think this logic we are trying to sell is attractive enough — but it will be. It’s inevitable. Maybe if we don’t call it micropayments, maybe we should call it flexible payments. But study after study shows that flexible payments are more popular with users… it has to be the future of the internet as a marketplace.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Maryna Pleshkun and Shutterstock / Patryk Kosmider

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Apigee manages, monitors and optimizes mobile application programming interfaces (APIs), which act as the glue connecting technologies, services and data sources across networks. So far Apigee has focused on the mobile industry, attempting to whip into shape the different network APIs used by hundreds of different carriers and present them to developers as a simple common interface.

Now Apigee plans to go after other industries such as healthcare and the airlines. Those industries have a lot of useful information, from frequent flier miles to health records, that developers would love to access if only it weren’t so fragmented. On Thursday Apigee announced what it’s calling the API Exchange, which essentially takes the model it’s devised for telecom and applies it to any other industry.

Healthcare companies and airlines actually have a lot in common in mobile carriers, said David Andrzejek, who heads up the Exchange for Apigee. Their industries are highly regulated and dominated by multiple, very large, vertically integrated companies using proprietary technology that is unfathomable to all but the most committed developer. “The barriers are normally just too high for any developer to build anything against,” Andrzejek said.

For the mobile carriers, the problem has always been that developers couldn’t just tap into a single API to use their location, presence or payment services – developers have to tap into the separate APIs of hundreds of carriers around the world. Consequently no developer wanted to deal with carriers, further marginalizing them. The mobile industry spent years trying to develop a common set of APIs that would present a unified front to the developer world. They failed spectacularly.

When Apigee took over the GSM Association’s OneAPI program, it pretty much gave up on the dream of standardizing under a single set of carrier APIs (which makes the program’s name a bit outdated). Instead, Apigee took to connecting all of the carriers’ different APIs to a single platform and then translating them into a single meta-interface that any developer could hook into. At Mobile World Congress this year, Apigee and the GSMA presented the initial fruits of that labor: an identity-management API any app developer could use to authenticate users via their phone numbers.

It’s still early days for the OneAPI project, but Apigee feels it’s learned enough dealing with the fickle mobile carriers to take on other big complex industries. Just like the carriers, airlines and insurance companies haven’t standardized under any common APIs, and for competitive reasons they’re unlikely to do so.

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Veteran tech blogger Lauren Weinstein describes this risk well in a recent blog post, in which he calls what the government of France is doing “extortion,” and warns of the long-term risk of Google acceding to such demands that it pay for the simple act of linking and excerpting content:

“There is little evidence to suggest that ‘paying off’ a party making unreasonable demands will do much more than quiet them for the moment, and they’ll almost inevitably be back for more. And more. And more. Even worse, caving in such situations signals other parties that you may be susceptible to their making the same (or even more outrageous) demands, and this mindset can easily spread from attacking deep-pocketed firms to decimating much smaller companies, organizations, or even individuals.”

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in his post on the Google settlement, the French originally wanted the company to pay as much as $100 million, and wanted almost all of that to go into a fund that publishers could use for their own purposes, rather than into ad buying or other joint ventures. And he also noted that with the latest deal — which comes on the heels of a similar settlement with Belgium — Google is sending a very obvious message to other countries such as Germany that it is prepared to pay.

Google’s tactics set a dangerous precedent

This may make sense for Google, since it is trying to avoid as much litigation as possible, and wants to be on good terms with European countries (where it has already run into multiple roadblocks and barriers around services like Street View and privacy concerns). But I think Weinstein is right when he argues that this is only going to encourage countries like Germany — and plenty of others as well — to assume that if they push Google on the subject of linking, they will get cash.

Google wants these payments to be seen as a helping hand to publishers, which is why the fund is described as “supporting digital publishing initiatives,” and why it puts so much emphasis on the strategic partnership angle. But regardless of the picture it is trying to paint, the settlement is being described by many as a “pay for links” deal, and that perception is dangerous. As Weinstein puts it:

“France’s complaints regarding Google related to activities that are absolutely part and parcel of the fundamental and fully expected nature of the open Internet when dealing with publicly accessible Web sites [and its] success at obtaining financial and other concessions from Google associated with ordinary search and linking activities sends a loud, clear, and potentially disastrous message around the planet, a message that could doom the open Internet and Web that we’ve worked so long and hard to create.”

In other words, this issue is much bigger than just Google. While it may serve Google’s purposes to settle with France and Belgium, and perhaps other countries as well, all that does is encourage other governments and companies to see payment for links as an appropriate strategy. How long until U.S. newspapers and publishers start to argue the same thing? What about other companies? Director Harvey Weinstein (no relation to Lauren) said in a recent interview that the U.S. should have legislation to make this a reality — and Google is helping that kind of thinking gain momentum.

It’s cruelly ironic that the company spent so long arguing (correctly) that excerpts of books were fair use in its long-running legal battle with book publishers and authors — a battle in which at least one court has agreed with the company — and now here it is paying newspaper publishers for what is fundamentally the same practice. It’s a short-sighted appeasement strategy, and we could all be the worse for it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Alexander Santander and Flickr user Affiliate

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But an app idea developed this weekend at Dwolla and Etsy’s first eCommerce Hack Day in New York offers a compelling solution. Miss Nev (as in “never miss a package,” not “Miss Nevada”), the winning hack of the weekend, wants to recruit local business to receive packages for neighboring residents and in return get more store traffic, agreements to make minimum purchases, or payments.

For now, the Miss Nev app, which was created in 24 hours, only includes two businesses and a barebones website. (The team tried for NeverMiss.com but the URL was taken.) But the developers — students who have been learning to program at venture collaboration group The Hatchery for just seven weeks — say they plan to build it out and raise money to turn it into a real service.

“The idea came about because there’s this store where I live that takes packages for people in the neighborhood for goodwill,” said Regina Chen, one of the five team members. “It’s a wine store, so whenever people pick up a bottle of wine they would pick up packages. So I thought, huh, that’s a pretty good business model.”

The app is definitely in its most nascent stages and needs to be fleshed out quite a bit, but I still think it addresses a growing need and would love to see it (or something like it) become a real service. We have more ways than ever before to order products straight to our doors. But making sure we can actually sign for the packages is a headache for many of us.

Over the past several months, Amazon has been slowly rolling out a locker system that turns local 7-Elevens and grocery stores into pick-up stations for customers who can’t be home to receive their shipments. The program first drew headlines last fall and, according to Amazon’s website, has expanded to Seattle, New York, the Washington, DC area and London. Last week, TechCrunch reported that it has added Silicon Valley as well.

The Miss Nev concept is similar but would work for shipments from any e-commerce company and could give local merchants new opportunities for developing relationships with nearby residents. The group acknowledged that liability could be an issue, but said a ratings system (similar to eBay’s or Airbnb’s) could help give users a way of gauging reliability. Another concern could be ensuring that merchants don’t receive more packages than they can actually fit in their space, but the Miss Nev team said testing a solution is in their plans.

Of the team members, only Mike De’Shazer, the class’s teacher, builds apps for a living (with product development and consulting firm 140 Ventures). Chen works in product development, David Ho has a background in finance, Karla Colon is a former lawyer, Costas Kollias is a designer and Jared Mermey works in business development. Other members of the Hatchery Dev Shop class, including an actor and a geneticist, contributed to the hack over the course of the weekend, and De’Shazer attributes their success to the diversity of the team.

“Everyone here has a completely different background that they brought into this app, unlike most apps which are built by engineers or business development teams,” he said. “We were able to think more like the customer and that led to us coming up with a more viable product and better user experience.”

The eCommerce Hack Day, which took place at the co-working space The Alley, included about 225 participants who made 37 hacks. The judges, who included Union Square Ventures managing Albert Wenger, Softbank Capital principal Nikhil Kalghatgi and others, gave the team behind MissNev the $6,000 top prize, but also recognized ShopPapaya (a price trends analytics tool) and Dollarly (an app developed by Voyurl founder Adam Leibsohn), which won second and third place prizes, respectively.

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As it ramps up for its initial public stock offering, there’s been a lot of attention focused on Facebook’s lack of performance as an advertising platform, despite its enormous size and reach. It’s an important issue for investors thinking about areas of future growth for the giant social network, as they try to justify what is likely to be a market value of at least $100 billion. But Facebook has other ways of monetizing its vast user base that could have even more growth potential — although they also come with more risk. One of those is Facebook Credits as a payment method for both virtual goods and real-world goods. Could Facebook become a networked version of PayPal?

Anyone who has played Facebook-based games such as Cityville or Texas Hold ‘Em Poker is likely familiar with Credits, since they are the default method of payment for Facebook games and virtual gifts. The social network launched its virtual payment system in 2010 as a beta test, and then rolled it out early last year and announced that all developers would be required to use Credits as their default payment method. This news caused a considerable backlash in the virtual gaming industry, since Facebook takes 30 percent of the revenue processed through Credits (just as Apple takes a 30-percent cut of all transactions handled through its iOS apps).

Use of Credits quadrupled in 2011, Facebook says

Last year, Facebook’s non-advertising revenue — the bulk of which comes from virtual payments using Credits (an estimated 12 percent of which came from game developer Zynga) — was $557 million, or about 15 percent of the total, according to the company’s S-1 securities filing. That was more than four times what the company pulled in from payments in 2010. And since that figure represents Facebook’s 30-percent take of the total, that means users spent close to $2 billion in Credits last year:

In April of last year, Facebook announced that users would be able to use Credits to purchase vouchers or coupons for goods and services that could be redeemed via the social network’s Deals service — which is similar to Groupon’s social-buying platform. Gift cards with Credits stored on them are also available in a number of stores across the U.S. and in Asia, including Target, Walmart and Best Buy, and there are a number of services that have tried to leverage Credits as a platform for payments, such as TrialPay (which gives users Credits when they sign up for new services) and ShopKick. Facebook has also applied for and been granted crucial “money transmitter licences” in a number of states, which it would need in order to become a large payment-handling entity.

As the CEO of another Credits-based service noted in a blog post earlier this year, the use of Facebook’s virtual currency outside the virtual-game business has been gradually accelerating: for example, several movie studios such as Universal Studios and MGM have promoted their films on Facebook by allowing users to view them by paying with Facebook Credits. And Peter Vogel said he expects Credits will soon be integrated into a variety of services such as Spotify, which use the Facebook “open graph” platform:

Look for Spotify to add Facebook Credits as a payment option for these new users, potentially even offering special introductory rates to entice users to commit to a year-long membership.

The Plink CEO also notes that one of the things holding Credits back from being a broader payment system is the lack of a repeat-billing function, which would allow users to make regular weekly or monthly payments. For now, Credits can only be used as a one-time payment service, which makes it difficult for anyone who sells their services on a monthly subscription basis (newspapers and magazines, for example, or video-streaming services like Netflix) to use Credits effectively. That could be one reason why only 15 million of Facebook’s 900 million members used the virtual payment system last year.

Forcing use of Credits could be a red flag for regulators

Even as it tries to build Credits into a payment platform with more to it than just casual games, however, Facebook’s dominant market share in the social space has led to accusations that it is being anticompetitive by forcing developers to use Credits as a payment system — and the more it tries to tie Credits to other things, the more ammunition it will provide for those critics. Another potential fly in the ointment is that some developers say Credits don’t convert casual users into paying subscribers as well as they had hoped. Kevin Chou of social-gaming company Kabam told Inside Social Games:

We thought that conversions would go up and be around 15 or 20 percent. But it turned out to be around 5 to 10 percent, meaning that we’re taking a 20 percent net tax.

If the social network is going to get more developers and services to implement Credits, it will have to show that the conversion rate is better than that, or no one is going to want to pay the network its 30-percent commission. Just as Apple has seen some prominent publishers and others leave the iOS app store for the open web to avoid payments, Facebook could see a similar exodus if it doesn’t show the value of Credits. And if it tries to force payments rather than creating incentives, that’s a red flag for antitrust regulators.

Ironically, one of the reasons that Facebook itself is pushing HTML-powered, web-native versions of mobile apps is so that it too can avoid the 30-percent penalty that Apple imposes for playing in its ecosystem. Having web-based apps with Credits as a payment system would allow Facebook to implement all kinds of potential subscription and payment options without having to pay Apple 30 percent of its own 30-percent cut.

In the end, the most likely scenario for Credits is that Facebook will implement them as a payment system for open-graph apps like Spotify: after all, these providers are already connected into the Facebook ecosystem, and users are accustomed to using the social network as an authentication service. Adding payments would seem to be a relative no-brainer. And if less than 2 percent of users can generate $500 million in revenue, how much could Facebook generate if 10 or 20 percent of its user base started using Credits regularly? The only question is whether enough users will want to give even more of their online lives to Facebook, including control over their digital wallets.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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Such an initiative, GoPress, is now rolling out softly to offer chargeable access to replica editions.

GoPress is owned jointly bynine Belgian publishers: Concentra Uitgeversmaatschappij, Corelio Publishing, De Vlijt, Editions de l’Avenir, IPM, Mediafin, Persgroep Publishing, Rossel and Roularta Media Group.

It is powered jointly by digital newspaper scanning agencies Mediargus, which is owned by Belgian newspapers, and PressBanking to make the editions available as HTML5 across multiple devices.

But editions, 32 of which are so far available, are priced individually rather than with a single pricepoint for the whole kaboodle.

All of which makes GoPress not unlike PressReader, the digital replica clearing house that stocks more than 2,100 newspaper editions and which nevertheless includes both individual and all-in monthly subscription

Users can authenticate using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Payment is powered by Dutch online content payment facilitator Cleeng, which already powers payment on France’s LaTribune, which now charges for some of its web articles.

GoPress is scheduled to be in full-swing by summer. But it’s by no means certain that delivering newspapers to digital screens in their traditional format will set Belgian readers’ worlds alight.

Belgian news publishers have been amongst the world’s most vociferous when it comes to protecting their position against what they see as pilfering search engines.

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The company, which makes it radically cheaper to transfer money from one country or currency to another, is announcing a small seed round today of just €1 million, or $1.3 million. While that’s not a lot for a financial startup, the money is really a secondary concern compared to where it comes from, since the list of investors reads like a who’s who of financial startup entrepreneurs.

Alongside Levchin, who earned his chops a decade ago with PayPal and later sold Slide to Google, comes an array of talented angels, including Shamir Karkal of banking startup Simple, Errol Damelin of British loans service Wonga and former Betfair CEO David Yu, and others.

It’s not just angels either. From the institutional side comes money from IA Ventures in New York, Index Ventures in Europe, as well as France’s Kima Ventures, Seedcamp and The Accelerator Group.

“We were self-funded and we figured: let’s go out and get the best group of people together,” Transferwise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus told me. “It’s fairly small but it didn’t take us too much time to do… we said ‘who do we want to help build this up as a global business?’.”

Sounds like they got who they wanted.

But what, exactly, is this collection of big hitters putting their money into?

Transferwise’s business is simple: it basically cuts out the fat from currency exchange and passes the savings on to customers.

It does this by bypassing traditional ways of wiring money and instead making the process transparent and consumer friendly. The service’s engine essentially matches transfers in one currency to those in another, and sends the money locally, from a bank account in the host country to the target account, instead of transferring it across borders — a P2P-styled approach that has led some (including me) to call it the “Skype of currency exchange.”

Users don’t necessarily see the matching process, but they do see what it produces: savings. The approach the company takes means that it can offer consumers a competitive exchange rate — at the rates banks use themselves, not the rate they charge you — and minimize fees too.

As an example, says Hinrikus, a typical transfer of £1,000 into a Euro account through Western Union will cost you more than €120: with Transferwise it will cost €5.46.

I think the idea has got a lot going for it, but given the size of the market — conservative estimates suggest around $150 billion flows through currency exchanges each day — things are still very, very small right now: the company saw €10 million of payments go through its systems in the first year, for example.

Hinrikus says that is partly because there is only one currency pairing available on the site — from pounds to Euros and vice versa — and because marketing is nothing more than word of mouth. However, the numbers are growing, he says, and businesses are even starting to use the site for their payroll in foreign countries.

There are plans to expand the currency slate (though the US dollar remains unlikely due to regulatory constraints) and try to speed up the process. It currently takes 1-3 days for a payment to arrive, because that’s the minimum speed required to be competitive — but the team says they’d love to make wiring instantaneous in the future. And there are other possibilities, too: there may even be a long-term business product for heavy users, for example.

But right now the small team of 10 is focused on improving the service full stop and be as disruptive to traditional banking as possible.

“The disruption in airlines happened about 20 years ago, with Easyjet and Ryanair and the like, and Telecom disruption happened about 10 years ago with Skype,” he said. “It hasn’t happened in finance yet: we’re seeing it in different verticals, with Wonga do lending, we’re seeing Lending Club do peer to peer lending, now we’re doing payments. But this is at the very beginning.”

But how easy would it be to disrupt the disruptors? Is this idea easily copied? Could the banks and simply drop their prices?

“I’m not worried about that part,” says Hinrikus. “The business we’re in there is technical complexity, regulatory complexity, business complexity, so it needs a very specific group of people. What we have, with my background as the first employee at Skype and growing an idea from the back of a napkin, and [co-founder] Kristo Kaarman’s financial background, we have really complementary skillsets — and now we’re being supported by the smartest investor group.”

Which, it seems, is probably a useful point to lay out the remaining list of investors. As well as IA, Index, Kima, Seedcamp, TAG, Levchin, Karkal, Damelin and Yu come some less familiar — but equally experienced — names: Denise Aptakar of PayPal, early Skype employee Sten Tamkivi, and Meyer Malka, the founder of South American trading platform Patagon.

This brains trust, the company hopes, can help launch it from a regional concern to a global player, which may mean more funding is necessary sooner rather than later.

“It is, in the end, a scale business,” says Hinrikus. “The goals we have are much further ahead — and we know we have to invest to get there.”

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The money comes from the Technology in Central and Eastern Europe Fund SICAR (3TS Cisco Growth Fund), backed mostly by Cisco.

Piano took a €300,000 first round in September from Monogram Ventures, which it said valued it at €1 million. It wants to use the new money to hire overseas staff, undertake marketing and develop software further. Netokracija speculates Croatia and Serbia may be next.

The product of a JV between Prague-based media consultancy NextBig and continental PPC ad targeting house Etarget, Piano launched one year ago with ambitions to create a payment package which would give consumers access to multiple, competing news services.

More than 20 publishers in Slovakia and Slovenia have now placed more than 60 sites in to the schemes. Piano takes between 15 and 29 percent of fees paid in by subscribers; the lion’s share is split between publisher partners proportionately according to time spent on their sites.

Piano made €40,000 ($52,248/£33,256) in its debut month in Slovakia and €26,000 in its debut month in Slovenia. Now it has been pitching itself to publishers in several other countries.

The sums Piano has achieved so far are relatively small fry. The company explains that internet populations in its first two markets are small and not usually disposed to paying online.

Publishers also are by no means placing the whole of their sites in to Piano’s payment package – only a minority of content or other features like comments are included.

It remains to be seen whether Piano can prove itself attractive to publishers in larger markets, where “cartel” concerns may dissuade otherwise interested operators and where a growing number of payment platform vendors is trying to woo publishers at the same time.

Many publishers are still making the switch from free to paid online content, but many who have already done so have begun charging for their own content individually, using platforms like Press+.

But Piano has succeeded in corralling rival publishers in to the same ecosystem and says competition is no concern because it is an access provider not a JV partner.

• Discuss Piano Media’s strategy with Tomas Bella at paidContent 2012, our conference for digital media decision-makers, on May 23 at New York’s TimesCenter. Find out more

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The new invoicing feature is part of a broader redesign of the WePay site, which allows users to sign up with Facebook Connect and begin sending invoices, receiving payments or charitable donations, and selling items with very little hassle. Invoices in particular are targeted at the SMB market, as WePay hopes to set itself apart from other payment services that aren’t as easy to use.

The invoicing feature is just one part of WePay’s latest update, as the site has also added a host of new premium features. That includes the ability to customize color schemes, add company logos and set up recurring invoices. While there’s no setup or monthly fees associated with the new features, WePay takes a larger percentage of the payment — 6 percent as opposed to the usual 3.5 percent.

While the payments market is heating up through the introduction of startups like Square, as well as innovation being pushed by some of the leaders in the business like PayPal and MasterCard, WePay founder Bill Clerico still sees a huge opportunity as payments move online. The online payments market is about $1 billion trillion today, he told me in an interview, compared to the $20 billion trillion still exchanged by check.

To meet that demand, WePay has raised $9 million, including a $7.5 million round in Summer 2010. It has 35 employees and is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

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But, ultimately, Zipmark has bigger plans beyond the checkbook: it hopes to use the check-payment network as an entry point into other non-checking transactions.  That could help it stand out among competitors like PayPal and payment solutions from banks.

The company, which raised $2 million in December, led by Village Ventures and Contour Venture Partners, leverages the existing check-processing infrastructure to create a digital payment system that it says is fast, simple and cheap for users and merchants. The startup charges 1 percent for each transaction and caps fees at $5 regardless of the total amount. With the new developer program, merchants and developers will be able to offer Zipmark payments to customers using an API that will enable authorized checking transactions.

For merchants and billers, the appeal of Zipmark is, in part, speed: it authorizes payments and forwards the funds the next day, instead of two to four days for most checks. Also, by tapping the existing checking network, Zipmark can keep fees low enough to provide an interesting alternative to credit-card payments.

For consumers, they will be able to use the iPhone app to connect bills from participating merchants to their Zipmark account. They will be able to scan QR codes provided by vendors on their bills and then pay from their phone for things like rent, subscriptions, utility bills and other recurring expenses. They can also get future bills directly through their Zipmark app.

“In a lot of cases, paper checks are being sent. That means payment takes a while to get there. And for businesses, it’s a bad outcome. They’re getting a paper check they need to handle, and there’s a chance someone can overdraw the account so the check won’t be cashed,” CEO and co-founder Jay Bhattacharya told me. “Zipmark addresses those shortcomings.”

Zipmark’s most natural business customers will be companies that take recurring payments. To capitalize on this market, the company has lined up a handful of early partners including Singular Payments, which helps companies bill their customers; UnitConnect, a property management software company; and InvoiceASAP, which provides mobile invoicing services. But Zipmark isn’t just looking to handle payments from landlords and utilities. It’s also looking to become a payment option for retailers.

“PayPal handles transactions and takes money out of a checking account and puts it into a PayPal account. We can do that without taking it into a separate account,” said Bhattacharya.

The online payment space has attracted a host of new entrants in recent years. PayPal is still the big leader, but the list includes Stripe, Dwolla, Payz and others. All of them are trying to compete with credit-card networks and banks, which have had a stranglehold on the payment business for decades

Zipmark will, of course, have to prove popular with both merchants and consumers. If merchants share some of their savings with users in the form of promotions of discounts, that could also be an incentive for them to adopt Zipmark.

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