PayPal Teams With Ingenico For POS Payments

Payment-Terminals

A new partnership between PayPal and payment solutions company Ingenico will allow consumers to make purchases through their PayPal accounts at retail stores that use Ingenico’s point-of-sale terminals.

The alliance marks PayPal’s efforts to compete with rivals like Google and Visa in the mobile wallet space. Customers would be able to enter a mobile phone number and PIN linked to their PayPal accounts to buy goods at checkout. They would also have the option of swiping a special PayPal card to pay. 

Ingenico supplies 15 million payment terminals in more than 125 countries. In North America, the company describes itself as the market leader in Canada and the No. 2 POS manufacturer in the United States. Home Depot and Kohl's are anong the U.S. retail chains that employ the company's technology at checkout counters.

"By working with PayPal to bring their payment solutions to offline retail, we will naturally empower both the merchant -- by providing a better way to connect with its shoppers to generate incremental sales -- and the shoppers by adding speed and convenience at the checkout combined with expanded payment options,” stated Thierry Denis, president of Ingenico North America.

Don Kingsborough, vice president of retail and pre-paid products at PayPal, said the arrangement with Ingenico would allow millions of its customers to make purchases at their favorite retail stores using PayPal via mobile phone or card.

M-commerce is booming for the eBay unit, which last year saw mobile payment volume -- including both person-to-person and mobile purchases jump to $4 billion from $750 million in 2010.

AT CES last week, eBay CEO John Donahoe projected that PayPal will see $7 billion in mobile payment volume in 2012. Companies including Starbucks, Fandango, Pizza Express and Yorder teamed with PayPal to offer new mobile payment options from scanning phones at the register to buying directly via mobile to avoid lines altogether.

Former PayPal President Scott Thompson, who left the company this month to become CEO of Yahoo, last September laid out an ambitious plan for PayPal’s expansion into mobile shopping. The aim is to make the service available on any device (not just mobile phones) and across the purchase process from enabling geo-targeted advertising to POS payments to loyalty offerings.

Ingenico said it has already begun integrating PayPal's payment card solution into its legacy Unicapt32 POS devices, as well as its entire new generation of Telium 2 series terminals. It did not provide a timetable for how long the rollout would take in the U.S. The company recently announced the launch of a new m-commerce platform for U.S. retailers that allows a variety of mobile payment options including near-field communication.

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