PayPal Closes Paydiant Deal, Expanding NFC Options (April 6, 2015)
PayPal has moved significantly closer to its goal of making its digital wallet “ubiquitous” for consumers paying online, via mobile devices and at the POS. The San Jose, Calif.-based company last week closed its acquisition of Paydiant, a white-label mobile payments platform for merchants that supports NFC and QR codes, expanding the ways consumers can use its digital wallet to pay via mobile devices and at the POS. And, this summer PayPal will roll out its NFC-enabled chip-and-PIN card reader in the U.K. and Australia, with the U.S. to follow later this year, a PayPal spokesperson tells Paybefore. PayPal has not yet announced any other plans to support NFC, according to the spokesperson.
NFC—until late last year—was treading water in the U.S. But the technology is catching fire now, spurred by the spread of more NFC-enabled handsets and the rollout last fall of Apple Inc.’s NFC-based Apple Pay. PayPal already is popular with consumers using it as a payment option embedded within other apps, such as Uber. PayPal also enables in-store payments for customers who enter their mobile phone numbers and PINs at payments terminals. Home Depot was an early adopter of that approach.
As NFC-enabled POS locations expand, consumers are warming to the tap-and-pay approach, recent consumer data suggest. More than 75 percent of U.S. consumers reported high satisfaction with the NFC payment experience, compared with a 53 percent satisfaction rate for paying with QR codes, according to a study Strategy Analytics conducted for the NFC Forum released in February. NFC also came out ahead among technologies for receiving information about products from merchants. Half of respondents preferred using NFC to retrieve product information, compared with QR codes at 23 percent and Bluetooth beacons at 10 percent.
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