PayPal spokesperson Anuj Nayar put up an interesting blog post today about how the company wants to be branded with regard to payments in the future. Basically, the company doesn’t want to be pigeonholed into being just a mobile payments company.
From Nayar’s post. “I beg of you, the media and the industry as a whole – do not call PayPal a mobile payments or mobile wallet company – just call us PayPal. I will even settle for digital wallet – but I prefer just “PayPal”. We do not want to be lumped into a category where people are using technology to create solutions that are not solving a problem.”
This point of view is somewhat surprising considering mobile has been the buzzword in the payments industry for some time now, and PayPal has been pushing this for the past year. But we know PayPal and its new leader, David Marcus, are trying to shake things up, and evolve into a more innovative company.
PayPal wants to be known for more than just mobile payments, and doesn’t was users and merchants to forget that it has 113 million active users using PayPal online. Obviously there is tremendous competition in the mobile payments space, with Square and others dominating, but PayPal is trying to use its digital presence as a differentiator. It’s a smart move. As Nayar writes, “PayPal is expanding our core product to solve problems for consumers, merchants, developers and advertisers – not just trying to re-create a wallet that we already invented 14 years ago.”
The post also denounces NFC (which isn’t surprising–PayPal has dabbled in the technology, but hasn’t bet on NFC the way Google has).
I’m sure we’re going to hear more from PayPal on just how they are offering the ultimate wallet, which includes mobile, digital and other components. Marcus has said he and his team of engineers and designers are working hard on developing new, user-friendly products that consumers will actually use. Stay tuned.