PayPal Here Is Coming To The UK, Its First Mobile Payment Market In Europe, Armed With A New Way To Read Your Card
Make way for one more player in the European mobile payments space, and a big one at that. Today, the online payments giant PayPal announced that from this summer …
Context & Ripple Effects
PayPal Here began in 2012 as a direct response to Square, pairing a mobile device with card acceptance. PayPal’s 2012 acquisition of card.io added smartphone-camera technology for capturing card details; the UK rollout brings that card-reading approach into PayPal Here’s first European market.
First-order effects
- PayPal commits to entering the UK mobile-payments market from the summer, giving local merchants a PayPal-branded route to accept card payments on mobile devices.
- The launch puts PayPal Here’s card-reading method in front of UK merchants, extending the product beyond the market in which it was introduced.
Second-order effects
- Square faces a better-resourced direct rival in the mobile card-acceptance category, making merchant acquisition and ease of onboarding more consequential.
- PayPal’s use of camera-based card capture raises the competitive value of payment experiences that reduce dependence on a separate reader or manual card entry.
Third-order effects
- If merchants adopt camera-assisted acceptance, mobile payments may compete less on the physical reader and more on software-led onboarding and transaction flow.
- The UK launch signals that mobile card acceptance is becoming an international expansion market for established online-payments platforms, rather than a standalone-reader niche.
The trend: Established online-payments platforms are extending their merchant networks into mobile point-of-sale, using software and phone hardware to challenge dedicated card-reader services.