PayPal talks up in-store mobile payments and One Touch adoption

By Rian Boden in Las Vegas • • nfcw.com

In-store mobile payments have experienced a “long and difficult road” but the functionality is now starting to resonate with consumers, PayPal’s EVP and chief operating officer Bill Ready has told attendees during a keynote at Money20/20.

PayPal Bill Ready
OPTIMISTIC: PayPal’s Bill Ready

The company also revealed more than 3m consumers are now actively using the PayPal One Touch mobile payments solution introduced in August 2014.

“The reason I didn’t think that in-store was the right first use case was really that consumers adopt solutions to payments really quickly, they adopt new experiences really slowly,” Ready told attendees during the event. “If you look at the in-store experiences that have succeeded over the last few years, it’s generally because they solve some material pain point for the consumer.

“The ecommerce-style experience is starting to come into the store — it’s just coming into the store in ways that deliver value propositions to the user, versus necessarily saying ‘hey, tap instead of swipe or tap instead of dip’.”

“I think while it’s been a long and difficult road for in-store, it’s starting to become, ‘here’s the thing that is resonating to consumers’,” Ready added. “There’s going to have to be some value proposition there for the user.”

Ready also discussed PayPal’s views on Zelle — the P2P mobile payments platform unveiled by Early Warning this week — and its anticipated impact on PayPal’s Venmo.

Common enemy

“I have been hearing about Venmo killers for three years now,” Ready said. “I think the really key thing and what actually makes me excited about Zelle and others coming into the space is, we all have a common enemy in cash.

“The more people are coming together and helping to inform users that you can do these things digitally, you can do it electronically, I think it benefits the whole ecosystem.”

PayPal announced a deal with Mastercard to extend NFC mobile payments through PayPal to the in-store point of sale in the US in September 2016. It followed a similar deal announced with Visa in July.

Next: Visit the NFCW Expo to find new suppliers and solutions