PayPal, American Express Get Together in Mobile Payments Advance

Back when it was starting to look like PayPal might be terminally separated from eBay, a flurry of deals emerged from PayPal that might well have made the whole point moot. New business came in left and right, and with each day that passed, PayPal almost looked ready to lose eBay and suffer only minimally, if at all. The recovery of eBay, meanwhile, only meant that PayPal was in a better place than ever, and now a new deal has emerged to further cement PayPal’s future.

The new deal connects PayPal—and by extension Venmo as well—to American Express, allowing the group to collaborate on new solutions. Some of these new features will start showing up in 2019.

New features set to hit in short order include the ability to use Membership Rewards points with PayPal merchants, and the ability to send money through PayPal or Venmo using the Amex mobile app. Users will be able to pay their Amex bill with a PayPal or Venmo balance, and card-specific branding will allow users to identify an American Express card through the PayPal wallet.

PayPal’s CEO and president Dan Schulman noted “…Our new partnership expands PayPal’s ubiquity, and enables us to offer consumers and merchants new and innovative product experiences. We are pleased to partner with American Express as it is a clear demonstration of positive innovation for our customers that is made possible through partnership.”

This might have been a lot more vital to the company back when the eBay mess was still going on, but the good news here is that that disaster seems to have been largely averted. Now, PayPal has a ton of new deals on hand generating revenue for the company, and this latest move should help with that all the more. Granted, it’s just American Express, which is the third-place finisher in the credit card stakes by a healthy margin. If this had been Visa or Mastercard we were talking about, that would have been a much bigger deal.

Still, PayPal’s made a serious leap forward here, and may well be able to use it as fodder to gain ground with other firms. PayPal might be a much bigger part of the mobile payments picture going forward than some might have expected.