PayPal announced today that it has acquired card.io, its partner company that allows developers to use a smartphone to capture credit information.
In the mobile payments space that is becoming increasingly crowded with major players like Square and Google Wallet and minor upstarts like Venmo, PayPal has acquired its first company in over a year. While last year’s moves were aimed at mobile payments, this acquisition points toward bolstering PayPal’s digital wallet–the area where Square, Google Wallet and others have boldly entered before PayPal.
In a PayPal blog post, Paypal VP of Global Product Hill Ferguson wrote that, “The employees at card.io will be joining the PayPal global product team in San Jose to help us create new experiences to make it even easier for consumers and merchants to use the PayPal digital wallet. The current card.io technology will remain available to developers for use in their own applications.”
Will users favor Paypal’s hardware-less mobile payments (left and center) over Square? That’s what the company is betting on.
According to one source, “The whole ethos at PayPal right now is to bring in as many technologies for processing as possible.” When the company saw what Square was doing, they created Here, and card.io fits in perfectly with this plan.
card.io has powered Paypal Here since March. card.io has added big-name partners, like Uber and LevelUp, since then. While users won’t immediately see a difference in their experience, card.io employees will immediately begin working at PayPal. Ferguson writes that they joined to “accelerate innovation at a scale,” presumably mixing startup energy and large resources to take market share as fast as possible from Square and Google Wallet.
PayPal is an online payments and money transfer service that allows you to send money via email, phone, text message or Skype. They offer products to both individuals and businesses alike, including online vendors, auction sites and corporate users. PayPal connects effortlessly to bank accounts and credit cards. PayPal Mobile is one of PayPal’s newest products. It allows you to send payments by text message or by using PayPal’s mobile browser. PayPal created the Gausebeck-Levchin test, which is an implementation...
Square is making commerce easy for everyone. Starting with a free credit card reader for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, Square Reader allows anyone to accept credit cards anywhere, anytime, for a low transaction rate of 2.75 percent per swipe, with no hidden fees. Square Register serves as a full point-of-sale system for businesses to accept payments, manage items, and share menu and location information. Square Wallet, available in the US, is the most seamless way to pay,...
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