The disclosure relates to initiating and completing peer to peer payments or peer to merchant payments initiated by financial cards and cameras of mobile devices. In some embodiments, the disclosed systems and methods may provide an accurate determination of parties involved in a peer to peer transaction, be useable with hardware and software that users are already in possession of, and securely initiate a peer to peer transaction. The disclosed systems may include a server communicatively coupled to a mobile device by a network. The server may receive an image of one or more financial cards, retrieve account information for each financial card in the received image, generate a proposed transaction based on the retrieved account information, transmit the proposed transaction to the mobile device, receive approval for the proposed transaction and initiate a payment or a transfer to an account based on the retrieved account information.