SAN FRANCISCO – PayPal isn’t worried about Apple Pay taking away its long-earned reputation in and share of the e-commerce market.
Speaking at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco, PayPal CPO Hill Ferguson said his company and Apple’s new mobile payment app have different goals in the payment space.
“Last thing we want to do is try to be a replacement for a card swipe,” Ferguson said.
In addition, Ferguson said that being able to pay more conveniently is the more powerful trend right now and that PayPal has been busy investing in SDKs so it can be integrated where payments occur.
That focus on easing the path for developers has landed PayPal in a lot of branded apps, as has the company’s partnership with platforms like Tillster, which got PayPal into Burger King through the solution Tillster built for the fast-food chain.
PayPal is also integrated with Uber’s app, but Ferguson insisted that his company didn’t buy Braintree just to get into Uber. Braintree is a mobile payment processing service working in Uber, AirBnB and OpenTable, but PayPal’s interest in the company, which it acquired last year for $800 million, is more about expanding its mobile payments portfolio.
PayPal has been in mobile payments for a while. Ferguson said his company had an SMS-based mobile payments solution before smartphones and cloud-based tokenization before card issuers started making the technology proprietary.
PayPal could have another huge partner coming into the fold soon. Alibaba, the China online retail company that just recorded $9.3 billion in sales in a single day, expressed interest in working with PayPal to widen its payment options.