PayPal's ubiquitous vision

A couple of interesting posts about PayPal this week. 

First, they presented their ideas about competing with Visa and MasterCard at physical points-of-sale.

"PayPal set up several user scenarios that are intended to disrupt the way we pay for things online and in stores today, using a variety of technologies. What stood out was that none of the scenarios required merchants to adopt new infrastructure or buy new terminals. Likewise, customers won’t be required to upgrade their phones or have certain types of bank accounts.  Instead, PayPal users (of which there are 100 million worldwide) will be able to pay by entering a phone number and a PIN code at the existing payment terminals, or by swiping a PayPal-issued card that’s not associated with a bank and does not have an account number printed on the front."

This was followed up by a blog post from PayPal President Scott Thompson, PayPal Unveils the Future of Shopping:

"PayPal is re-imagining money and making it work better for merchants and consumers – whatever device you’re on, wherever you are in the world, and however you prefer to pay (whether that’s cash, credit, or installments)."

Which has led to all sorts of headline write-ups in various media.

Bottom-line, as I've said so often recently, there is no online and offline anymore.  Just real-time ...

 

 

Comments

[Cherian Abraham]

If PayPal went the NFC route, which rely on existing POS and Card Infrastructure, PayPal’s gains will be much smaller compared to its current online e-commerce revenue, owing to existing cost structures for processing payments at POS. PayPal would prefer that customers bypass the POS infrastructure completely and use its payment gateway. As competition heats up at the traditional POS hub for NFC based mobile payments, one should see more technology companies like PayPal opting to circumvent POS and Card infrastructure and create their own service framework. A cloud based competitive backbone to the traditional payment networks could disrupt the current interchange environment. Am I wrong?

[Raghavan Guruswami, Hyderabad, India]

An ideal payment infrastructure, in my view, should be all-inclusive - physical, virtual or on-line rather than specific or exclusive. Am I asking for too much?

[PayPal Collections]

PayPal’s gains will be much smaller compared to its current online e-commerce revenue, owing to existing cost structures for processing payments at POS. PayPal would prefer that customers bypass the POS infrastructure completely and use its payment gateway.