PayPal CEO announces NFC payments expansion

Vodafone Wallet with PayPal NFC-enabled payments is now live in Spain and is expected to be made available across Europe throughout the “back half of 2016”, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman revealed during the company’s Q1 earnings call. He also discussed the new PayPal Android app that brings with it NFC functionality.

PayPal“Our partnership with Vodafone in Europe will have tens of millions of European customers [able] to use PayPal as their preferred way to fund their payments,” Schulman told investors. “We are now live in our first market, Spain, and we anticipate expanding across Europe throughout the back half of 2016.

“Our partnership with Vodafone delivers what consumers, businesses and European regulators want — better products, more choice and greater transparency.”

“The mobile app is a fundamentally redesigned app,” Schulman said in answer to a question about how the new app — unveiled at Mobile World Congress earlier this year — changes PayPal’s in-store value proposition. “It really brings us into the mobile world. It puts up front the things that customers want to go out and do, it doesn’t clutter it up.”

Consumer engagement

“It’s simple, easy,” Schulman added. “It’s driving increased consumer engagement and it also enables us, for consumers, to now be able to use their mobile phone in-store whether that be through NFC or QR codes. The way that I think about in-store is really in-store, online, in-app — they’re all coming together. It’s just commerce is the way to think about it.

“It’s all moving towards mobile and we basically want to be able to utilize for merchants this underlying platform so that we can be their OS, do 100% share of checkout, enable merchants to create their own application, tie their rewards into our platform, do things like split tender at checkout and create a real value proposition change for consumers so that merchants can use mobile to get closer to their customers.”

PayPal processed US$21bn in mobile payment volume during Q1, a growth of 54% from the same period last year and the number of payment transactions per active account increased to 28, up 12% from 2015. PayPal’s Venmo P2P mobile payment app also processed nearly $3.2bn in payment volume in Q1, up more than 150% from last year.

Vodafone Wallet partnered with PayPal to enable PayPal NFC payments through the service in February this year.

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One comment on this article

  1. Notwithstanding the otherwise constant stream of disingenuous and delusional nonsense that flows from eBay/PayPal, the share price history of these two clunky operators demonstrates the reality:

    Aug 2007: (pre John Donahoe) EBAY ~$40; AMZN ~$40;
    Jul 2015 (pre eBay-PayPal split): EBAY ~$66; AMZN ~$480;
    Jul 2015 (post-split): EBAY ~$28; PYPL ~$37; AMZN ~$530;
    Currently: EBAY ~$24; PYPL ~$39; AMZN ~$661—LOL

    PayPal is standing still, and eBay has for years been effectively going backwards—at a steady rate of knots.

    And, notwithstanding the “spin-off” of PayPal from eBay, eBay and “PreyPal” remain effectively joined at the hip—for at least the next five years—and anyone that thinks otherwise is simply uninformed; and, thanks to a continuation of most of the destructive policies introduced over the eight year reign (2007–2015) of the “Pain from Bain”, John Joseph Donahoe II, the eBay marketplace is continuing on its slow journey down the toilet; nevertheless, during Johnny Ho’s occupation of the eBay corner office, this cretin and his gang of hand-picked Keystone Kops still managed to obtain for themselves massive, unearned, “performance” bonuses—while the company’s “long” shareholders received not one penny.

    PayPal is a clunky, non-bank-licensed, non-deposit-insured, virtually non-regulated, “pretend” bank; a higher fee-charging payments intermediary that, in the main, rides on the back of the world’s banks’ existing payments systems, with no formal agreement with those banks other than PayPal’s operating of a credit card merchant account facility with, and the making of direct debits/credits on some users’ bank accounts via, one of those real banks.

    PayPal is, in its own words, “a merchant of sorts”, it is not a licensed “bank”; virtually everything that “PreyPal” does is done via “marketing” arrangements with licensed financial institutions—for example, look for the identity of the actual credit provider (in the micro print) on their credit providing instruments.

    Funds received via “PreyPal” are at risk of being subjected to lengthy arbitrary holds; funds left “on deposit” with PayPal are not FDIC-insured. Even more perilous (for PayPal’s shareholders), the great majority of PayPal’s business originates from its (still) effectively mandated place on the eBay marketplace, so it logically follows that—with the destructive Johnny Ho-Ho-Ho now sitting at the head of the PayPal boardroom table—”PreyPal” will undoubtedly be accompanying eBay on its journey to the sewage farm.

    The reality is, PayPal’s parasitic, higher fee-charging payments operation has little long-term future—outside of its mandated place on the atrophying eBay marketplace—now that professional online/mobile payments offerings from MasterCard (“MasterPass”) and Visa (“Visa Checkout”) are available to any online merchant that has (or can obtain) a credit card merchant account with a real bank.

    And, with respect particularly to “mobile” payments, notwithstanding Apple Pay’s disappointing initial showing, methinks Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Android Pay, “MasterPass”, and “Visa Checkout”, that is, those operations that have formal relationships with the world’s retail banks and MasterCard/Visa, will soon enough throttle the flow of oxygen to a great deal of the clunky PayPal’s parasitic operations.

    PayPal users should never give PayPal an authority to direct debit their bank accounts; PayPal should only ever be given access to funds via a real-bank credit card account; that way your credit card-issuing bank will be the final arbiter of any transaction dispute; similarly, sellers should never accept payment via PayPal for goods that are going to be picked up by the buyer; PayPal offers sellers zero protection from scammers in such circumstances.

    PayPal’s one-time adoptive parent, eBay, is likely the most unscrupulous commercial entity operating on this planet; but, have no fear, eBay is an equal-opportunity fraudster; demonstrably, they will knowingly aid and abet the defrauding of buyers by unscrupulous eBay merchants who bid on their own auctions, and, conversely, of honest sellers by unscrupulous buyers—as long as there is a financial benefit in such fraud for eBay.

    And if anyone thinks that the clunky “PreyPal” is any more scrupulous—given their equally poor customer service and lack of any mediation of transaction disputes by human beings, which effectively results in a hard-wired bias towards buyers/payers that they now necessarily have to pander to—good luck to all you small online merchants who may get burned in the process.

    For a detailed analysis of the ugly reality of eBay’s demonstrable, calculated, facilitation of endemic shill bidding fraud on consumers on its auctions marketplace—Google “Shill Bidding on eBay: Case Study #5”

    Goodbye clunky PayPal—it’s not been nice knowing you—Google “Retail Payments: The Reality”

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