PayPal allows in-store payments via Mastercard deal

Paypal has struck a deal with Mastercard that will allow the payments platform to be used in stores.

“Our bread and butter is, we’re a checkout company,” Jim Magats, PayPal’s head of global core payments, told the Wall Street Journal. “What merchants want is our conversion, and they’re willing to pay for removing any friction in checking out.”

The details of the arrangement have yet to be sussed out fully, but in the coming months, it’ll see PayPal users gain the ability to select a MasterCard-branded credit or debit as a default payment method for purchases.

The aim is to end fights with the big card issuers and make PayPal a universally accepted method of payment.

This would include in stores at the checkout counter, with MasterCard’s and Visa’s mobile-tap tools, the big new frontier for payments companies.

The deal comes as Mastercard continues to expand its Masterpass platform. Issuers and merchants around Europe are making Masterpass available to their customers, enabling fast, simple and secure digital payment experiences across devices and channels – online, in-app and in-store. By end of June 2016, Masterpass was accessible to 200 million consumers across 18 countries in Europe, almost twice as much as by end of Q1 2016.

As the share of digital payments in Europe keeps on growing to reach 38% of payments by 2020, the continued transformation of Mastercard to an even more digital company is driven by the rapid growth, support and success of Masterpass, the company’s digital payment service.

40 major issuers across 18 countries in Europe, including KBC Bank in Ireland, Intesa Sanpaolo in Italy, SEB, Nordea, Swedbank, ICA Banken and Resurs Bank in Sweden and Viseca in Switzerland are now using Masterpass to integrate digital payments into their services.

Roland Zwyssig, CMO of Viseca Card Services SA said: “we have chosen Masterpass by Mastercard as it is a global, customer-friendly and secure solution. From January to June 2016 we have achieved 400,000 Masterpass registrations, really impressive.”

As e-commerce spend in Europe is predicted to grow 55% by 2020 and the number of global smartphone subscription grow from 1.9 billion in 2013 to 5.6 billion by 2019, Masterpass offers the only issuer-branded solution that supports multichannel and multi-device commerce. By adding digital payment functionality through Masterpass, issuers can enhance and differentiate their existing product suite, including their mobile banking application, and integrate its proprietary services – including balance display, purchase alerts and paying with points – to differentiate its solution from other digital payment options in the market. Key issuers in Asia, Europe and the US have committed to auto-enroll 80 million wallets into Masterpass by year end.