By Lily Asis
Payment integrations between PayPal and Google Pay will soon be much smoother after the organizations confirmed a deeper partnership last month. The new integration will make it easier for users to purchase Google services, such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Store and Google Pay, using PayPal accounts. The new arrangement is expected to come into force in North America later in 2018, which will span both commercial and peer-to-peer transactions.
Photo by Mohamed_hasan, CC0 Creative Commons
Earlier this year, Google decided to rebrand and combine all its payment services under one handy umbrella, titled Google Pay. It was hoped that this process would make transactions on its platform simpler. This latest development allows Google users to incorporate their PayPal account details into their Google Play accounts to help pay bills and other services via PayPal, without having to log in and out of their Google accounts.
Google Play has been rocked by recent developments that suggested cyberhackers are developing fake games and tools suitable for Google Play to covertly mine for cryptocurrencies. The dubious apps are listed on Google Play but don’t function as described; instead of displaying a range of online ads that are used to power cryptocurrency mining. Kaspersky Lab researchers found a string of dubious apps and have made Google aware of these security issues. Among the most popular apps with built-in miners was the Portuguese-based PlacarTV, which featured a Coinhive miner within the app and mined Monero coins while the app’s users streamed live soccer games.
It is not the first instance of Google and PayPal working in partnership. In fact, PayPal has been a payment method within Google Play since 2014. However, recently, Google has partnered with several other payment providers in a bid to make the payment process frictionless for all Google services. The likes of Visa, Mastercard and Stripe have been joined by innovative payment providers, such as Braintree, CyberSource and Vantiv.
Bill Ready, COO of PayPal and co-founder of Braintree, told TechCrunch that seamless payments benefit both PayPal and Google users alike.
“We are always looking for ways to improve the experience and to make payments even more seamless and secure for our customers wherever they want to pay,” said Ready. “After the successful launch with Android Pay last year, which built on our existing integration with Google Play, our teams came together to enable this new experience, which will allow customers in the US who add PayPal to any one of Google’s services to be able to pay across the Google ecosystem anywhere that PayPal is offered as a payment method, with only minimal setup.”
For some time, Google has concerned itself with how to keep users within its ecosystem when completing transactions. The PayPal integration will ensure fewer users leave before making a payment, reducing the number of abandoned purchases. From the PayPal point of view, their inclusion as an additional payment method not only makes it easier for consumers but it should also translate into increased transaction revenue for them.
As one of the most widely trusted e-wallets, its simplicity and integrity have allowed PayPal to guarantee secure payments in iGaming, which is one of the fastest-growing online industries on the planet. It has also been a critical payment method for e-commerce and the financial sector and appears to be well-cemented in the functionality of many high-street brands, as PayPal’s encouraging Q1 2018 revenue figures testify.
During the first three months of this year, PayPal reported $132 billion in total payment volume (TPV), which is up a whopping 27 percent year-on-year. The gain is thought to derive from a 35 percent rise in active users, on top of a 25 percent increase in total transactions. New partnerships such as its integration with Google Pay will further serve to maintain this exciting growth curve for the company. Certainly, for consumers, the digital revolution is making their lives much simpler. Digital wallets such as PayPal are accelerating purchase processes, leading to a significant rise in the number of impulse purchases that are music to the ears of online retailers. Another new partnership with M-Pesa is expected to expand PayPal’s digital reach into Kenya later this year while its domestic services in India also grew in the previous quarter, as PayPal bids to become a more global company than it already is today.
