PayPal, Android Pay Get Together on New Venture

Recently, we heard about how Android Pay was looking to be the perennial second place to Apple’s Apple Pay system, and also, we heard about how well PayPal was doing on the online shopping front, beating out even credit cards on some fronts. A new report combines these two points into one intriguing new potential whole as Android Pay and PayPal will now be working together.

Under the terms of the new partnership, PayPal will now be an option as a payment method in Android Pay, which allows PayPal to, effectively, be used anywhere Android Pay is taken.

Given Android Pay is only accepted at slightly fewer places than Apple Pay, the end result should open up a great new opportunity for PayPal to be used at brick and mortar outlets.

It’s set to start with just the PayPal balance, but later this year, that will expand to include the cards connected to a PayPal account as well. This actually isn’t the first time PayPal’s tried such a thing, and has been actively working to be a part of potential competitors’ operations rather than competing with them directly.

PayPal recently set up a deal with Visa to make PayPal an option when customers used smartphones to pay in stores, and a similar deal followed with Mastercard.

Given that PayPal saw revenue of $2.98 billion in the fourth quarter of last year alone, it’s clear that its strategy of making deals with just about anyone in sight is paying off for it going forward. By being “an option” on so many platforms, it’s opening up the field to be used, even if only occasionally.

Any place where it’s an option, it might be used, and in the process it gets access to a new market that it might previously not have tapped. That kind of flexibility opens itself up to get a piece of most every market, and that’s potentially good news for PayPal.

PayPal may have found a way to readily infiltrate all of its competitors and give itself a real advantage in the market. We may well see a lot more places taking PayPal before too much longer, thanks to the sheer versatility of this mobile payment platform.