PayPal Connects With Thyngs To Improve Cashless Proximity Payments
At first blush, cashless proximity payments look like the stuff of science fiction. Wave your smartphone at something, and you’ve paid for it, thanks to some behind-the-scenes software that manages all the connections from one key point. It’s rapidly becoming a thing, though, and to that end, PayPal recently hooked up with Thyngs, a startup company that’s pushing greater contactless payments.
The connection is a sound one, as Thyngs offers both near-field communications (NFC) and quick response (QR) scanning capabilities which allow things—pretty much anything, really—to become mobile payment points. Thyngs has already made something of a name for itself on the charity front, and is branching out into more standard retail applications.
By bringing PayPal into the mix, it’s made a much greater jump into mainstream retail operations, and will in turn give Thyngs users new options as well as greater overall convenience in operations. With over 200 million active account holders, PayPal represents one of the leaders in payment platforms. A combination with an enterprise-grade platform like the one represented by Thyngs means a greater opportunity to take advantage of.
Thyngs’ CEO Neil Garner noted “We’re delighted to be able offer PayPal as another core payment option through our platform. It furthers our objective of providing our clients and their customers with the best possible on-the-go payment experience, helping to make cashless payments as familiar, easy and convenient as paying with cash.”
Basically, Thyngs’ new connection to PayPal is just a shot of credibility. While Thyngs’ platform likely works, and probably works well, getting it into stores and the like probably would have been a tall order. By connecting with PayPal, meanwhile, that could open up several new doors for the company and give it access to markets where its comparatively small size and relative obscurity would have hampered it. PayPal, meanwhile, gets to offer a whole new option to its users, one that works well and makes what was already pretty convenient even more so.
This combination should prove advantageous all around, and give both PayPal and Thyngs new options going forward in providing services for users.