Love Your Starbucks Corporation App? It's About to Be Everywhere

Do you enjoy the ability to walk into a Starbucks (SBUX -0.35%) and pay with its app? A fast moving start-up will to let you do that almost everywhere.

Making a payment
Whether it's PayPal or Google who have already dived in, or the speculation surrounding recent moves by Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), much has been made of the potential changes that lie ahead for the way individuals pay for things everywhere.

However, one of the most vivid -- and surprising -- examples of success in mobile payments has been Starbucks.

Jason Oxman, the CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association -- whose members represent over $4 trillion in annual payments processed -- remarked in an interview earlier this year:

Starbucks is the number one mobile payments platform in the country right now. They are the single most successful mobile payments provider because they've done it right.

The aim for change
But that hasn't stopped -- and it may have even fueled -- others to attempt to dive in.

Apple itself was recently reported to be searching for a new executive from the payments industry in an effort to "build an electronic payments business," according to Re/code, a news and analysis site focusing on the technology industry.  

This is to say nothing of the remarks made by Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier, when he asked about the mobile payments industry by The Wall Street Journal and he responded:

I think it's a really interesting area. We have almost 800 million iTunes accounts and the majority of those have credit cards behind them. We already have people using Touch ID to buy things across our store, so it's an area of interest to us. And it's an area where nobody has figured it out yet. I realize that there are some companies playing in it, but you still have a wallet in your back pocket, and I do too, which probably means it hasn't been figured out just yet. 

Yet there is a little known start-up called Loop which has figured out a patented way to allow individuals to make payments on the existing credit card terminals in stores, yet use their mobile phones to do so.

In the video below, Motley Fool contributor Patrick Morris chats with Loop co-founder and CEO, Will Graylin at the TRANSACT14 conference about his technology, and how it can allow merchants to mimic the Starbucks experience. It can also let individuals pay seamlessly and easily almost everywhere with their phones, which could change payments as we know it.