As Apple Pay continues its expansion to more retailers and payment providers (most recently, it appears, in-store at Best Buy), and Stripe continues its expansion march, another one of the big competitors in the payments space is today publishing numbers that underscores how it’s growing, too. PayPal division Braintree, which the payments company acquired in September 2013 for $800 million, says that it is on track to ring up $50 billion in authorized payments volume by the end of 2015.
Braintree also says that it now has 154 million cards on file across 46 markets — triple the number on file when it first made the leap to PayPal. As another point of comparison, Braintree had processed $12 billion in transactions in September 2013. And while Braintree now handles payment processing for many PayPal services, too, the company says that the $50 billion is a like-for-like comparison in terms of what it is measuring.
Juan Benitez, GM of Braintree, says the numbers that Braintree is unveiling are a signal of how the company is hoping to become more transparent to users about its size and what it does as a business, a return to how the company used to do things. “Before the PayPal acquisition, Bill [Ready, the CEO] made a priority to tell the market about our progress, and we want to come back to that and share where we are at,” he said.
Some of the big milestones of growth for the company include its partnership with Bigcommerce, which added 90,000 merchants to Braintree’s payment processing platform, as well as its recent acquisition of Modest. Like Stripe’s expansion to enable the building of native buying experiences in apps, the idea behind Modest will be that it will give PayPal and Braintree a better way of integrating further into third-party sites.
“We believe the Modest acquisition will be as transformative as Braintree’s first acquisition, Venmo,” says Ready.