PayPal Inc. is pushing to expand use of mobile-wallet services as it stakes out its turf in the mobile-payments market, executives said Feb. 10 during a presentation at parent eBay Inc.’s analyst and investors day.
Payments volume made on mobile devices using PayPal’s service should more than double this year, surpassing $2 billion, Sam Shrauger, vice president of global product and experience, said at the event.
“We can do for mobile payments exactly what we did for online payments,” Shrauger said, adding the company’s connections to payment networks, banks, merchants and consumers can make all the “disconnected systems” needed to facilitate mobile payments work together.
Buzz around mobile payments has grown in recent months with rumors that Apple Inc. and Google Inc. are developing digital wallets that would enable consumers to use smartphones as credit cards for point-of-sale transactions. The major payment card networks, including Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide, are developing their own services that banks are testing.
The challenge will be getting merchants equipped with the right hardware to accept smartphone payments and establishing universal standards to ensure programs attract enough users, experts say.
Shrauger and other executives did not explicitly state what PayPal’s specific plans are for facilitating mobile payments. However, Shrauger said the company, which says it has 94 million active customer accounts, plans to continue developing its existing mobile-wallet technology and extend access to more customers. It defines an active account as one that has made, received or reversed a payment in the past 12 months.
“We’re creating a digital wallet that can work for consumers regardless of which technology they’re using and which devices they happen to prefer,” Shrauger said.
In October, PayPal and VeriFone Systems Inc. announced that PayWare Mobile users that have Apple Inc.’s iPhones would be able to accept PayPal funds by bumping their phones with PayPal’s users’ iPhones (
The company also already offers downloadable applications that consumers use to access their PayPal accounts for Apple’s iPhone, smartphones using Google’s Android operating system and Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry devices.
“There’s a myriad of standards out there, but we know how to fix that complexity,” Shrauger said. “Having one technology is not the answer. Having one digital wallet in the cloud is the answer.”
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