The GoPayment service has been around since 2008; its smartphone credit-card reader became available in January 2010. Intuit's main goal with mobile payments is to make transactions as frictionless as possible. To that end, last week the company demonstrated a new debit card that you can pair with your GoPayment account. Funds you take in through GoPayment become available on the card, without going through a bank account. This arrangement simplifies the setup process and helps small businesses separate their business finances, as they use the debit card to make business purchases with funds directly coming from sales. GoPayment users will still have the option to transfer funds to a bank account. The debit card is "coming soon," but Intuit mentioned no specific time frame.

Intuit is also working to improve the GoPayment system with cloud-based inventory, so that users can maintain inventory from a central point-of-sale system and push it out to floor salespeople or field workers using the GoPayment mobile app. One final improvement to the GoPayment service is the addition of near-field communication technology to send payment details between phones equipped with NFC chips. Both upgrades are coming "later," according to Intuit. just went live earlier this month in the United States.

At the event, Intuit detailed how security works with its GoPayment system, and why its list of supported devices is so much shorter than that of competitor Square (something I wondered about ). The GoPayment card scanner encrypts data before sending it through the audio jack to your smartphone or tablet, making it more difficult to ensure that each Android device is properly reading the protected data, but keeping security tight.