While PayPal continues to be one of the dominant online payment services today, the company has been plagued by its relatively aging software and difficult to use developer APIs. However, the company plans to change all that with the announcement of its purchase of the back-end-as-a-service company StackMob.
As one of the most popular online payment platforms today with over 137 million active users, Paypal needs no introduction. On the other hand, StackMob is a service-oriented company that helps developers in implementing features for mobile app development. This can mean anything from adding push notifications to login functionalities for social networks. The company works on fleshing out developer APIs for a number of platforms and programming languages such as Android, iOS and JavaScript.
The StackMob acquisition provides PayPal's core engineering team with valuable assets that they can use to update its platforms and services. Hopefully, the addition of StackMob will make it easier for third party developers to implement PayPal APIs in their mobile apps. This news comes hot on the heels of PayPal's announcement last September that they will be redesigning their mobile apps.
"They've proven the ability to build really flexible and solid platforms," says James Baresse, Chief Technology Officer of Paypal. "When you lok up and down at PayPal, we are rapidly expanding and in many case (sic) rewriting parts of our backend. Given our need to have really amazing services, both for internal engineers as well as our external experience, we need experience on how you built these things out at scale." Baresse adds.
PayPal has constantly been committing resources to updating many of the payment platform's features. In spite of the progress the company has made, they have chosen to buy smaller companies who have both the expertise and technologies PayPal needs to completely revamp its current offerings. The company recently purchased Braintree, an ecommerce processing specialist, for a reported $800 million earlier this year in a bid to update PayPal's API platform.
"By joining PayPal, the StackMob team will maintain its focus on developers and extending innovative mobile technologies that aim to allow consumers to access the rich capabilities of the PayPal global network," says Ty Amell, CEO and founder of StackMob. "We believe that our work at PayPal will make it easier for developers to create seamless payment solutions that span online, mobile, and in-store experiences." The company counts Red Hat, Adobe Systems, Verizon and Urban Outfitters among its clients.
