Swedish mobile point-of-sale company iZettle is gaining ground in Europe. The company has announced that it will be launching services in Germany, and also that it has formed partnerships with DZ BANK and Deutsche Telekom to help it reach its goal of becoming a market leader there.

"Strategically, Germany is one of our core markets, and we are committed to serving everyone from individuals to small businesses here long term," said Jacob de Geer, iZettle CEO and co-founder. "Our ambition is to become the undisputed market leader in Germany and given the partnerships with DZ BANK and Deutsche Telekom we believe we are very well positioned."

Like other mobile POS companies, iZettle provides merchants, usually small businesses with the ability to turn a mobile device into a point of sale terminal. With iZettle, however, merchants can process chip-based cards instead of just cards bearing a magnetic stripe. The cost to merchants is 2.75 percent of each transaction.

According to iZettle, more than 75,000 merchants have signed up for the service in the five European countries where the company operates.

Through its deals with DZ BANK and Deutsche Telekom, iZettle will now have processing and distribution partners. Equens, a joint venture between DZ BANK and other European banks, will actually process iZettle transactions made in Germany. DZ BANK will also distribute the iZettle reader through selected branches of the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken, the banking cooperative it belongs to.

"With this cooperation we seek to offer customers of the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken cooperative financial network another innovative building block of our mobile payment portfolio that will be further developed with the contribution of our local cooperative banks' expertise," said Gregor Roth, DZ BANK's head of payments.

Deutsche Telekom will also distribute iZettle's readers through its branded stores.

Initially, iZettle will make 25,000 readers for iOS devices available for free to German merchants.

"We want to help small entrepreneurs not to miss a single sale in the upcoming Christmas business," said Andreas Barthelmess, managing director of iZettle Germany.

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