Continuing the hoopla from this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, PayPal introduces its own mobile payment framework with a unique twist.
The online service unveiled its new chip-and-pin solution for users and interested parties in the United Kingdom and Australia. The plan is to roll out PayPal Here, the NFC-enabled card reader, by this summer with later plans to release in the U.S. before the end of 2015. How is this possible, you ask? PayPal announced the purchase of Paydiant, a startup that provides technology used by big-name retailers such as Capital One and Subway as well as to Walmart via its Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), which provides express checkout to several large retailers.
For those still on the fence about PayPal, the service allows members and users to send and receive money without detailing one’s individual financial information. The PayPal NFC-enabled Card Reader will also give users and merchants the ability to accept mobile payments from Apple Pay and Google Wallet.
With the latter company unveiling at MWC plans to institute its own NFC-enabled service, Android Pay, there’s still no word on whether or not PayPal’s card reader will work with the search engine’s separate mobile pay service.
Able to accept credit card payments through chip-and-pin cards as well as near-field communication means that PayPal is looking to gain an advantage within the mobile payment marketplace. "The entire commerce [industry] is being rewritten from the ground up and mobile [is] playing a larger part in that," says Anuj Nayar, who serves as PayPal’s senior director of global initiatives.
All across the board major players are jumping into the mobile payment trend with places like Google and Apple releasing products ahead of the competition. As traditional credit card companies face blowback from recent hacks, Visa and Mastercard are just a few companies who won’t be liable for any sort of fraud incurred by magnetic stripes after October 2015. To encourage merchants, banks and credit card issuers to all switch to the new, more secure system, liability will rest with whoever has the lesser technology if there is fraud.
While PayPal has yet to reveal to the market and press just how much the Here NFC-enabled card reader will cost, it is very likely that the chip-and-pin reader will remain lofty in price, clocking in at the $100-$200 range. The PayPal device will support both iOS and Android, as expected, and will pair with smartphones and tablets through Bluetooth for instantaneous processing.
Hill Ferguson, senior vice president and the global head of consumer business at PayPal, opened up to consumers in a blog post that with the integration of NFC, merchants of "all sizes will now be able to accept contactless payments, wherever they do business."
Paydiant, a Massachusetts-based private company, was founded in 2010 by Kevin Laracey and Chris Gardner.
Photo: Nasce Pasquale | Flickr
