Hot on the heels of Google Wallet, PayPal has announced details of its own mobile wallet used to pay for goods and services offline.
From the Paypal Blog:
Over the next 12-24 months, we’ll introduce technologies that give consumers the choice to “swipe, enter, or tap†when they pay. Here’s how:
- With the new PayPal Card, customers will be able to swipe with one card to pay in-store from any of the financial instruments already saved in their PayPal wallet – whether that’s a bank account, credit card, or stored money.
- Or, they’ll be able to enter a mobile phone number and a four digit pin to pay.
- We can also work with retailers to offer NFC at the point of sale.
And no matter how you pay, you can go back and change the payment terms, even after the purchase. These are huge steps—and we’re only just starting to scratch the surface.
That last feature is a pretty cool idea; changing the source of your payment after your payment has been made, and apparently came about following feedback from a single (but prolific) PayPal user who wanted an “oops button”, allowing you to decide on how to pay even after the transaction.
Given the choice of ways to pay, Paypal’s wallet also has the advantage on not being tied to NFC-enabled devices (which is the case for Google Wallet), plus merchants do not have to install new hardware (simply upgrade their payment terminal software), which will further help the growth in these new types of payment.
PayPal has setup a demonstration store in New York to show off the new technologies.
Read more:
- GigaOM: PayPal softens stance on NFC
- Mashable: PayPal takes payments offline with PayPal Wallet
The next 12 months should be an interesting time for the growth of mobile wallets and NFC technology, but it’s still unclear which systems will emerge as the leaders; with Google, PayPal and probably eventually Apple entering the market, we wouldn’t currently bet against one of these big brands becoming the industry standard mobile payment mechanism.
Sounds great, just wonder why its taken them so long. A lot of my income is through paypal and it makes sense to be able to pay from paypal instead of having to transfer the money first before using it in the real world..