Priority onboarding: Easyjet teams up with Jumio to speed up mobile payments

Tired of squinting at your screen to enter payment details in a poorly-optimised booking form? UK-based budget airline Easyjet wants to make that a thing of the past for its customers, teaming up with payment identification firm Jumio to let users enter their details by simply scanning in their credit or debit card inside the app. That’s enabled by Jumio’s BAM Checkout tool, designed to simplify and speed up the process of booking on mobile as consumers continue to shift toward shopping on smartphones and tablets.

It’s not a new idea, with apps like Uber already offering card-scanning tools to make onboarding new customers as simple as possible and avoid people ‘abandoning the cart’ (giving up on registering their details in this case). Already a big issue online, the problem is even more acute on mobile, where entering details is still (broadly) a fiddly and frustrating experience. The move makes a lot of sense for Easyjet, where offers and deals on flights mean it often falls into the spontaneous or ‘impulse buy’ category – the kind of purchase shoppers are increasingly likely to make on mobile.

Nor is Jumio the only player in the space, with Uber’s card scanning feature powered by Card.io at launch, a company snapped up by PayPal in 2012.

Easy

Jumio tie-up

This also marks an expansion of the partnership between the two companies, with Easyjet already integrating Jumio’s Fastfill to its mobile check-in portal in 2014. Fastfill is similar in principle to Google’s autofill tool in that it populates data like passport number to the booking form –but does so by scanning a customer’s passport to extract information. The firm claims the tool cut mobile check in time by 83 per cent and says that 160,000 customers scanned in their passports using the tool in the six months after it became available.

Palo Alto-based Jumio also works other travel companies including United Airlines and Bravofly. The firm operates in the hotly-tipped digital ID and personal authentication space and aims to help reduce fraud, leveraging its computer vision technology to verify documents like passports and driving licenses. The firm has raised around $40m in funding and is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Citi Ventures, plus Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

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