PayPal and Venmo to move into in-store payments ‘next year’

PayPal is to begin a major new push into in-store payments next year, under both the PayPal and Venmo brands and using both NFC and QR codes, CEO Dan Schulman has told Axios.

Dan Schulman, CEO at PayPal
PAYPAL CEO: Dan Schulman

Axios asked Schulman if it is important for PayPal to have a place in the physical retail store.

“The short answer to that is ‘yes’, it will be important for us,” Schulman replied. “That’s because it is now beginning to take off. Before, it was kind of a solution looking for a problem.”

“What I’m beginning to see right now is that you can do different things by tapping a phone,” Schulman explained.

“You can actually figure out right at that point of sale, do I want to use rewards points to pay for that transaction, do I want to split that transaction between rewards points and fiat currency, do I actually want to… pay for it out of a debit card and put some of that on credit?

“So there’s a lot more flexibility, there’s a lot more of a value proposition. If I order ahead on my phone, I can skip a line, I can pick up the product right away, I don’t even have to check out. I can just leave the store.

“So I think that value proposition is beginning to pick up and, as a result, you’ll see PayPal increasingly become a part of the physical world as well as the digital world.”

“QR codes are something that we have today,” Schulman added.

“QR codes are something that, more and more, micro and small businesses will start to use. And the relationships we now have with all of the networks and all of the major financial institutions allow us to use industry standard tokenization and NFC capability, which is what Google Pay and others use.

“We can actually simply put in a PayPal Wallet experience for physical stores and anywhere those other wallets are accepted — it’s exactly the same technology, it’s near field communications technology — we’ll be able to use those as well.

“It should be both PayPal and Venmo that’ll be able to go do that and we’ll start to roll that out as early as next year.”

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