eBay's PayPal Buys Mobile Payments Startup Fig Card
In its second acquisition in two weeks, eBay's PayPal unit has bought mobile payments startup FigCard. Terms of the acquisition, which was announced on the PayPal blog, were not disclosed. — Boston-based Fig Card allows merchants …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is PayPal's second acquisition in two weeks, following the confirmed April 20 deal for location-based ad company Where.com, and it extends an M&A posture eBay established back in 2008, when it bought payments and classifieds businesses and restructured around them. Fig Card, a Boston-based startup letting merchants accept mobile payments, was announced via the PayPal blog with undisclosed terms.
The pickup was narrow but real — eMoney ran the same story under a headline pointing at PayPal's mobile-wallet ambitions, suggesting observers read the deal less as a product grab than as a signal about where PayPal intends to compete next.
First-order effects
- PayPal gains Fig Card's merchant-facing mobile payments technology and Boston team outright, adding a hardware-independent acceptance option to its online-payments core.
- Merchants evaluating mobile acceptance now have PayPal as a direct vendor rather than only through partnerships or checkout integrations.
Second-order effects
- The move puts PayPal into the same merchant counter space where card-reader startups are building early momentum, forcing those players to compete against a payments incumbent with an existing merchant base.
- Rival marketplaces and processors face pressure to answer with their own mobile-point-of-sale acquisitions rather than build, given how quickly small payments teams are being absorbed.
Third-order effects
- If undisclosed-talent-and-tech deals like this keep landing every few weeks, mobile point-of-sale consolidates toward platforms that own both the consumer account and the merchant relationship — squeezing standalone reader startups into exits.
- The pattern reinforces acquisition-led expansion as the standard route into new payment surfaces, making startup valuation in this niche partly a function of who needs to buy fastest.
The trend: Payments incumbents are acquiring small mobile-payments startups to extend account relationships from online checkout to the physical merchant counter.