Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, theCUBE co-hosts,  chatted with Tim Saunders, Co-Founder and CTO at CardFlight, during Day 3 of the AWS re: Invent 2013 conference in Las Vegas. On the agenda: the trends of the mobile payment industry, the disruptions in the market and their own journey and predictions.

CardFlight is New York-based, and sports a talented team of seven. “Part of our push is the PCI compliance, because we process credit card data. Some of the AWS sessions have really helped around security, encryption, and making PCI compliance easy and simple for us to run,” said Saunders.

For those unfamiliar with the term, PCI compliance refers to a set of requirements designed to ensure that all companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.

“CardFlight makes mobile payments really simple and easy for developers to get mobile payments up and running within their custom applications.

3 steps to setup CaradFlight custom apps

There are 3 easy steps, outlined by Saunders:

1. “We provide a piece of hardware, a magnetic, encrypted stripe reader which allows to integrate that into your own custom application.

2. We provide an SDK – with a few lines of code you can integrate into our reader, estimated under an hour

3. On our backend we connect with over 23 different payment processes, which allows us to be the middle way between your custom application and payment processes which people have come to love over the years.”

“Mobile payments are a disruption in the payment industry,” noted Vellante. “What are the drivers in your business?” he asked of Saunders.

“Payments in general is a massive industry and e-commerce over the last decade has been massive, but the mobile payments is definitely a huge sector and I think there’s a market there. You can see from some of our competitors and several other people in the same space that mobile payments is really taking off in years to come,” predicted Saunders.

How is CardFlight different?

With such demand, there are obviously several similar solutions on the market. “So how is CardFlight different from Square?” asked Vellante.

“We really love Square, they are a great company. The only thing with Square is that you have to use their app, their reader, and their backend payment processor. There’s no customization. If you are a mid-sized level business and you have a custom application which allows you to process mobile payments, Square doesn’t really offer that as part of their solution,” explained Saunders. “That’s where we find our niche market: allowing developers to integrate mobile payments inside their applications.”

Kelly stepped in asking Saunders to elaborate on why he thinks that integration within own applications is so important, and how exactly that is delivering value.

To explain, Saunders relayed the example of EventFarm, and several other event management companies, who sell tickets and run their own custom applications. “CardFlight allows them to stay within their own applications and process their payments without having to switch to another application like Square.”

“Our target market is the mid-level businesses, companies that have their own custom app.”

Narrating the birth of their start-up, Saunders admitted that in the beginning CardFlight started with one of Amazon’s competitors. Because one of their huge factors was security, they wanted the best cloud service for their PCI compliance and found that with the AWS out of the box solutions.

If Saunders were to put a bumper sticker on the show, that would be “The best is yet to come.”