The More You Know: PayPal Readies New Expansion With Mastercard

Not so long ago, PayPal made a great big step onto the everyday stage by making a deal with Visa to bring its operations to just about anywhere where Visa cards are taken.

That was a huge step, and now PayPal’s taking things one step further by making a similar deal with Mastercard, allowing PayPal users to put its services to use in stores.

Under the deal, reports note, PayPal users can select a credit or debit card as a default payment, and then, using Mastercard’s tap-and-pay feature, use a card or mobile phone over an available reader to complete the payment.

The PayPal connection, meanwhile, allows users to bring out cash from PayPal accounts using a debit card, and without the normal digital wallet fee that PayPal is currently charged.

This is actually something of an expansion effort, as there was already a co-branding partnership between PayPal and Mastercard as relates to consumer credit cards throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.

Policies like these have delivered some impressive results for PayPal in the past; second quarter revenues for 2016 are up over 15 percent from the same time last year, and payment volume processing is up 28 percent against that same period.

What’s more, PayPal isn’t done yet; reports note that PayPal is also working with card-issuing banks to deliver some new partnership efforts and put PayPal in more hands.

The fact that PayPal is actually seeing increases in an era of such intense competition within the mobile payments space is excellent news.

The growing number of partnerships it’s forging likely has quite a bit to do with that growth, however, as it’s actively working to put its service in more users’ hands.

One of the biggest problems with any mobile payment platform is just getting users involved in the process, and with so many choices, it’s hard for users to pick any one platform over another without clear reason to do so.

PayPal’s push to be almost universally usable is a great move; where a store may not take Apple Pay or the like, it almost certainly takes Mastercard or Visa.

PayPal already had a great reputation going into these new deals as the payment vector of choice with eBay.

Now, PayPal’s making increasing strides in the brick-and-mortar world, and that means likely increases in processed payments—and profit—to follow.