Problem – Credit card processing is becoming increasingly complicated for merchants due to PCI compliance regulation and criminals compromising systems with sophisticated malware or physical credit card skimmers. Merchants don’t have the time or expertise to secure systems properly to combat these threats and generally just want an easy way to accept payments from customers without worry.<p>Solution – using the SQRL protocol which was designed as a password replacement for website authentication see - https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm and turn it into a new secure payment system where authentication/authorizations are done on the customer’s device. Since the merchant never has access to the credit card information this will remove the merchant as a target for fraud and eliminate the need for expensive PCI compliance. For brick and mortar merchants since authorizations are performed on the customer side no internet access would be needed on the point of sales reducing monthly expense and system complexity. This system would also enable digital payments that have so far been out of reach of most for things like vending machines and laundromats that currently have high threshold to entry and being unmonitored can be easily compromised by credit card skimmers.
For what it's worth, I don't know a lot of practitioners in software security, the payments industry, or cryptography who take SQR particularly seriously.<p>Since getting adoption for yet another payments system is a boil-the-ocean problem at this point, if you're going to go down that road, you might want to pick a more conventional cryptosystem to do it with.
This seems like an interesting idea<p>So the user will install your app and link their credit card, and every site that uses your service will just show a QR code?<p>It sounds like you suffer from a pretty bad chicken-and-egg problem. A merchant would have to accept both SQRL payments and regular payments if they wanted to make money. Merchants are not in the business of pushing a preferred payment method if it means they don't get paid. Every step between a shopping cart and a payment decreases the likelihood of a successful conversion. How will you address this?
Can you talk about your team? How many people are working on this full time, what are their skill sets, how long have they been working together, and previous accomplishments and work experience?
> a new secure payment system where authentication/authorizations are done on the customer’s device<p>How does this differ from Apple Pay/Android Pay, which is already making headway in this space?
1. Do you have any competitors? Doing something very similar?<p>2. There is an insane amount of startups in this space. who would be your first customers, and why them?