Tag: PayPal

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PayPal launches support for tap to pay on Android for merchants using Venmo and Zettle in the U.S.

PayPal announced today that the company is launching a tap-to-pay feature for merchants with an Android phone through the Venmo and Zettle apps in the U.S. As a reminder, PayPal owns both Venmo and Zettle.

Last November, the company launched similar functionality for businesses to accept payments by tapping cards or digital wallets in the U.K.

PayPal is already rolling out support for tap to pay on Android with the Zettle app — the company’s mobile point of sale management app. However, Venmo for business profile users will have a staggered rollout across the coming months with select businesses already using the feature. The company said that merchants can request early access to this feature.

This feature enables sellers to accept payments from cards or digital wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay without any additional hardware. PayPal charges 2.29% + 9¢ for every sale through the tap-to-pay method across Zettle and Venmo.

“Tap to Pay is the last milestone in the democratization of in-person card payments, where users can start taking card payments with no setup cost in a matter of minutes,” Ed Hallett, Head of Product, Microbusiness, PayPal said in a statement.

“We’re unlocking access to this capability for the millions of businesses using Venmo and PayPal Zettle, helping them drive sales with frictionless payment options.”

Additionally, the company is rolling out support for tap-to-pay on iPhone for Venmo for Business and Zettle customers in the U.S. after announcing the feature last November.

While iOS is the more popular mobile operating system in the U.S., Android is not far behind in terms of user base. Hallett told TechCrunch over a call that the company wants to leverage Venmo’s 90 million userbase — the number of end-users and not businesses — in the U.S. and allow them to accept payments without the hassle of going through any complex setup.

Venmo currently leverages Zettle’s tech for tap-to-pay on Android. The company didn’t explicitly say that they are looking to merge both products, but said they see a lot of “synergies” between Venmo for Business and Zettle.

PayPal’s expansion of tap-to-pay products comes months after rival Stripe announced a product enabling an equivalent feature on Android phones in six countries — the U.S., Canada, the U.K., New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. Comparatively, Stripe charges $0.10 per transaction for using its own payment gateway for tap to pay transactions.

In February, PayPal CEO Dan Shulman said he was leaving the company. Later in March, CFO Blake Jorgensen also stepped down after being on leave since September 2022 for health reasons. Currently, the fintech giant’s stock has been the lowest in the last five years.

PayPal launches support for tap to pay on Android for merchants using Venmo and Zettle in the U.S. by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Mastercard, PayPal and Robinhood dive deeper into crypto as industry shows ‘promise’

As the crypto market works its way through a downturn, more incoming money and users could help it weather the storm.

But right now, it’s sometimes challenging for the layperson to get into crypto. Understanding gas fees and wallets isn’t intuitive, and the perceived miasma of complication that currently surrounds the space is no help, either. To help foster user adoption and the resulting capital inflow, web3 needs smoother on- and off-ramps to make it easier to buy into and interact with blockchains.

Trusted providers with existing mainstream audiences are betting they can help fill that gap.

In recent weeks, a number of brand-name mainstream financial institutions have been rolling out new crypto products and services in an attempt to make the space more accessible. At the end of April, Mastercard, PayPal and Robinhood all independently talked about the measures they’re taking to do so at Consensus 2023 and how they are furthering their moves into the crypto ecosystem.

“Despite the market, we continue to be at the cusp of mainstream adoption,” Jose Fernandez da Ponte, SVP and GM of blockchain, crypto and digital currencies at PayPal, told TechCrunch. “We got into this technology because we believe it contributes to the idea of a faster, more inclusive financial services environment,” Ponte said.

The crypto ecosystem is in a “transitionary period,” according to Raj Dhamodharan, EVP of blockchain and digital currencies at Mastercard. The industry is figuring out the technology and what else can be extracted from it, and “a lot of energy is going to figuring out the next use cases,” he said.

People new to crypto are likely to be more willing to use a platform that they already know and trust to buy into web3 products and services. Household financial names opening their doors to the ecosystem could prove to be the catalyst that pushes crypto from a niche to something more.

On April 28, Mastercard launched “Crypto Credential,” a set of standards and infrastructure that aims to help certify interactions between consumers and businesses using blockchain networks.

“We’re excited about the underlying technology and the promise the technology offers,” Dhamodharan said. “We think public blockchains can be a utility to store and move value over time…and you have to show that you can do it in a regulatory compliant way.”

Mastercard, PayPal and Robinhood dive deeper into crypto as industry shows ‘promise’ by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

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Visa partners with PayPal, Venmo, and others to power interoperable digital payments

Visa is partnering with a host of financial service and payment companies for a new interoperable peer-to-peer (P2P) payment offering, one that allows people to transfer money to friends even if they usea different payment service.

While digital payments have inarguably transformed the world of commerce, the sheer number of payment apps out there has hindered people’s ability to send money to other people without a little friction. If they’re both using PayPal, great, but if they’re not then they will either have to do a bank transfer or juggle multiple different P2P payment apps.

Visa+, as Visa’s new service is called, is designed to solve that problem. Later this year, Visa+ will power a new integration allowing Venmo and PayPal users in the U.S. to transfer money between the two platforms. It’s worth noting that while PayPal does in fact own Venmo already via its former parent eBay’s $800 million Braintree acquisition a decade ago, it has hitherto not been possible to transfer money in real-time between the two services.

With Visa+ activated, neither user in a PayPal / Venmo transaction will be required to have a Visa card associated with their respective accounts. Visa merely serves as the infrastructure and connecting glue between the two services — the user sets up their own unique payment handle that’s linked to their PayPal or Venmo account, and then shares that handle with whoever they want to be paid by. This means nobody has to share mobile phone numbers, email addresses, or other personal details, which may prove particularly useful for one-off payments between people who are unlikely to interact again in the future.

Visa+

Visa+ Image Credits: Visa

Other companies that have committed to Visa+ for today’s announcement include Western Union, TabaPay, i2C, and DailyPay, which Visa says will go some way toward extending Visa+ to myriad use-cases including the gig and creator economies, as well as online marketplaces.

There are, of course, a swath of high-profile omissions from Visa’s initial roster of partners, including the likes of Cash App and major digital wallet providers such as Google and Apple. However, interoperability is emerging as a key bone of contention across the digital landscape including payments, with the Linux Foundation recently launching the Open Wallet Foundation to support interoperability between digital wallets. Visa+ fits into that broader push, albeit with limited scope in its initial guise — but Visa will likely be pushing for more third-parties to join ahead of its rollout.

Visa said that it plans to start making Visa+ available for consumers later this year, with general availability to follow in mid-2024.

Visa partners with PayPal, Venmo, and others to power interoperable digital payments by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

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PayPal adds Apple Pay support for small merchants using Advanced Checkout

PayPal is adding new tools for small business owners including Apple Pay support at checkout, the option for customers to save their cards for this specific site, and access to IC++ pricing.

Small and medium businesses currently have two ways to integrate PayPal in the checkout flow. In addition to the Standard Checkout integration that lets you accept PayPal payments with little effort, the company also has an Advanced Checkout integration feature for companies that want more personalizations and payment features. Companies that have opted for the latter option can now accept Apple Pay payments from their customers. The checkout tool already offers multiple options to customers — they can make payments via PayPal, Venmo, PayPal Pay Later, as well as with credit cards.

Last year, PayPal and Venmo announced support for Apple’s tap-to-pay-on-iPhone solution. It marked the beginning of a new business relationship between Apple and the payment company.

PayPal is also adding another tool to the checkout product. Customers can choose to save their cards in a secure vault for that particular ecommerce business — the card won’t be stored in a PayPal account as customers don’t need to have a PayPal account for card payments. So if users are shopping from that business frequently, they don’t need to punch in their card details every time. The payment company also has support for account updater and network token service, which automatically updates details when lost or stolen cards-on-file are reissued.

Nitin Prabhu, the company’s VP for merchant experiences and payment solutions told TechCrunch on a call that with Advanced Checkout, the company doesn’t share any purchase intelligence with other competitors. But he mentioned that the data they gather from a merchant site can be used to offer their products including PayPal Pay Later. He also noted that PayPal also uses the data to mitigate risk and fraud.

The fintech is also introducing the IC++ pricing model for businesses. Until now, PayPal offered a flat fee model for advanced checkout. But Prabhu said that for medium-sized businesses making multiple million a year, IC++ could offer a good alternative. The IC++ structure makes up of interchange fees (charged by the issuer bank), card network fees (charged by a network like Visa and MasterCard), and markup fees collected by PayPal. With this method, merchants can see if they can incentivize customers into using cards by a specific bank or a specific network.

PayPal is facing competition from Amazon, which launched Buy With Prime product offering checkouts and shipping in January. In a recent note to clients, Berstein said that companies are offering services beyond the checkout button, which has been PayPal’s core strength historically.

“For other pay buttons, like PayPal, for years the pitch of pay buttons has been that they drive up sales conversions by double digits. Today, the pay button alone is increasingly becoming commoditized given that almost a dozen options now exist and guest checkout (the real friction point for consumers) is shrinking in its share of checkout. While Buy With Prime may not be a big deal on its own in the context of overall eCommerce (which is larger than eRetail), we worry about the risk of share losses from a thousand cuts for PayPal. As a reminder, the core button remains the profit engine for PayPal, and within that business, SMBs are PayPal’s bread and butter (with deeply attractive economics),” the note said.

PayPal has also been trying to be a checkout option for different ecommerce purchases. Last year, it partnered with Amazon to offer customers Venmo as a payment option.

PayPal adds Apple Pay support for small merchants using Advanced Checkout by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Will Twitter, PayPal and Walmart compete to launch America’s super app?

Tim Harned Contributor
Tim Harned is a managing director at Progress Partners. He has had an M&A and capital advisory career spanning more than 30 years making strategic transactions for Fortune 500 and early-stage enterprises.

Ever since Elon Musk’s “be careful what you wish for” acquisition of Twitter, speculation about America’s first homegrown “super app” has soared.

In October, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” According to Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Musk is “thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.” Keep in mind that Musk founded X.Com and merged it with Confinity to create PayPal.

For context, China’s WeChat launched as a messaging service in 2011 and has since become a combination of Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak and Healthcare.gov — as well as more than 3.5 million partner “mini programs” that operate inside the app. PayPal and Walmart have been teasing their own versions of financial super apps since at least September 2021 but with much less fanfare.

Twitter, PayPal and Walmart could find themselves competing to monetize the financial lives of millions of people. That raises several questions: Why is now the moment for super apps in the West? How should we assess progress toward a super app? How are Twitter, PayPal and Walmart chasing this idea? Which one has the best odds of winning, or is there actually room for several leaders?

Why now?

Though popular throughout Asia, Latin America and Africa, super apps have failed to materialize in the U.S. and Europe. If Twitter, PayPal and Walmart are going to change that, we must ask why.

The benchmark of a fintech super app is how much financial activity it can concentrate into one ecosystem.

“Super apps took hold in Asia because Asian consumers owned under-powered smartphones that weren’t conducive to managing 40 to 50 separate apps,” according to Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors. In the U.S. and Europe, smartphones didn’t have the power or memory challenges typical of the hardware in less developed regions, so super apps were never a necessity.

Moreover, as Axios argues, data privacy fears, strict banking regulations, and Apple and Alphabet’s control over payments in their mobile operating systems have deterred would-be super apps.

A super app doesn’t solve an obvious problem for the Western consumer besides providing convenience and security (both debatable). That said, you could argue that such an app could bring finance, banking and credit-building opportunities to the underbanked or unbanked, who may be either excluded from mainstream financial services or fearful of them.

So why now?

Twitter has lost the digital advertising field to Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. PayPal is overdependent on payment processing, which is increasingly a crowded, competitive space. Walmart, always a step behind Amazon in digital, is overdue to try something its Seattle rival hasn’t tried.

Super apps represent a fresh and new pasture for these behemoths.

The process

Will Twitter, PayPal and Walmart compete to launch America’s super app? by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

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PayPal and MetaMask team up to make it easier to buy crypto

PayPal is primarily known as an online payment method. But the company wants to become an easy way to get started with cryptocurrencies. In that regard, ConsenSys, the company behind MetaMask, announced that it would add an integration in its crypto wallet so that users can buy cryptocurrencies using their PayPal account.

MetaMask is one of the most popular non-custodial crypto wallet out there. It lets you store crypto assets and interact with web3 products as you can use your wallet as your authentication method.

But you can’t do much if you have an empty MetaMask wallet. That’s why users rely on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken and FTX to buy cryptocurrencies and transfer them to their MetaMask wallet. MetaMask also has its own on-ramp features in its mobile app so that you don’t have to switch to another service and go through many intermediate steps. On-ramp partners include MoonPay, Wyre and Transak.

If you buy crypto with one of those partners, you will have to go through a KYC process (“know your customer”). It means that you will have to enter a bunch of personal information and verify your identity with some form of ID.

The partnership between MetaMask and PayPal will benefit both companies. On MetaMask’s side, chances are the conversion rate with existing on-ramp solutions isn’t great. KYC processes can be intimidating.

There are already 430 million PayPal accounts in the world according to the company’s most recent earnings report. If MetaMask users see a big button that says you can buy cryptocurrencies with a PayPal account, it will sound easy and familiar. As for PayPal, more activity means more revenue.

At first, MetaMask users will only be able to buy Ethereum (ETH) with PayPal as the payment method. It will be available to some users in the U.S. before it is rolled out to everyone in the U.S.

If you already have ETH in your PayPal account, you can use those ETH to fund your MetaMask wallet. If that’s not the case, PayPal will help you buy ETH with your PayPal balance or other payment methods.

And that is going to generate some revenue for PayPal as the company charges fees to buy cryptocurrencies. This is PayPal’s first integration as an on-ramp provider for a web3 wallet. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more PayPal buttons in crypto wallets going forward.

Earlier this year, PayPal also added support for crypto transfers. PayPal users in the U.S. can get wallet addresses to fund their PayPal account with crypto assets. Similarly, PayPal users can send funds to a third-party crypto wallet.

As many people consider cryptocurrencies as internet money, they think crypto can replace PayPal altogether as a way to send and receive money from a computer and a phone. But there will always be bridges between traditional bank accounts and crypto wallets. And PayPal plans to take advantage of that.

PayPal and MetaMask team up to make it easier to buy crypto by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

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After Stripe and Square, Venmo and PayPal are set to support Apple’s Tap to Pay on iPhones

PayPal announced Thursday that it will soon support Apple’s Tap to Pay on iPhones. The company said in its Q3 2022 earnings report that both PayPal and Venmo will soon support this tech as a part of its offering. Merchants will be able to accept contactless card payments as well as payments via Apple Pay and other digital wallets (Google Pay).

Apple first announced Tap to Pay on iPhone in February to let merchants accept payments without any additional hardware. The company had Stripe as a launch partner with Jack Dorsey-led Square coming on board later in September. Now, with Venmo and PayPal joining the fray, merchants will have varied options of apps and services to choose from to accept payments.

“We’re very pleased to be working with Apple to enhance our offerings for our PayPal and Venmo merchants and consumers,” the company’s President and CEO Dan Schulman said in a statement.

Apart from Tap to Pay, PayPal is also working on a few other Apple-related programs. The San Jose-based fintech said it will add Apple Pay as a payment option for the fintech’s unbranded checkout flows on merchant platforms, including the PayPal Commerce Platform.

What’s more, it said that U.S.-based consumers will be able to load PayPal and Venmo network-branded credit cards to Apple Wallet and use them with Apple Pay next year.

Last month, Amazon added Venmo as a payment option for U.S.-based customers ahead of the Black Friday sales. In its Q3 2022 report, PayPal registered $6.85 billion in revenue with 11% year-on-year growth.

After Stripe and Square, Venmo and PayPal are set to support Apple’s Tap to Pay on iPhones by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Amazon now allows customers to make payments through Venmo

Amazon announced that it will now allow customers to make payments through Venmo on its platform. The company said this option will be available to select customers starting today and will roll out to all U.S-based users on the Amazon site and mobile app by Black Friday next month.

To pay through Venmo, users will need to first add their account. During checkout on Amazon, users can select “Select a payment method” and then “Add a Venmo account.” This will redirect them to the Venmo app, where they can complete the authentication. Users can also choose Venmo to be their default payment method for Amazon purchases on that screen.

While paying with Venmo on Amazon, customers can use Venmo balance, linked bank account, or eligible debit card to complete the transaction.

“We want to offer customers payment options that are convenient, easy to use, and secure—and there’s no better time for that than the busy holiday season. Whether it’s paying with cash, buying now and paying later, or now paying via Venmo, our goal is to meet the needs and preferences of every Amazon customer,” Max Bardon, vice president of Amazon Worldwide Payment said in a statement. The ecommerce platform already offers different payment methods like credit and debit cards from networks like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diner’s Club, and JCB.

A recent survey named “Netfluential and Edison Trends PayPal and Venmo Study” noted that Venmo users shop two times more frequently than an average shopper. So that might be beneficial for Amazon in terms of increasing the number of transactions on its platform.

Amazon is set to announce its Q3 2022 results this week with expected revenues of $125 billion to $130 billion. Notably, this quarter also included its Prime Day sales held in July.

Amazon now allows customers to make payments through Venmo by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch