Eftpos to leverage PayPal's Australian online presence

PayPal will join Eftpos' payments hub next year in a partnership that will see the offline payments system leverage the online presence PayPal has in Australia to extend its reach.

Eftpos said it recently upgraded its infrastructure to allow for online payments and upon adding PayPal to its membership list, it plans to work with all members to see Eftpos available to consumers and merchants as a payment option for online transactions.

"Eftpos is happy to work with PayPal to make Eftpos payments available to more Australian consumers and merchants on new platforms," Eftpos managing director Bruce Mansfield said. "PayPal plays an important role in Australian online payments and Eftpos should be available as a payments choice for PayPal users."

Steve Fusco, vice president and general manager of North American distribution at PayPal, said that although technologies such as tap-and-go and chip-and-pin are dominant in Australia, the ubiquity of mobile connected devices has meant the expectation of consumers in the payments space has shifted.

"There are more mobile devices than there are human beings on the planet; the expectation that consumers have about how to interact with those devices, how to buy things, how to shop for things, how to learn, how to interact, do everything that they do has changed and the technology needs to accommodate those expectations," he said.

"When you think about it, everybody has a mobile device and they are becoming integrated into everything that we do far beyond anything that people may have expected previously.

"Australia is a great place to contemplate this direction; Australia is probably two or three years ahead of the civilised world in terms of adoption of these new mobile technologies."

Simon Banks, Director of Large Merchant for Australia at PayPal, believes Australia's mobile uptake boils down to the fact that Australians have always been innovative.

"We're a market where we've got a strong banking system, strong telcos, and we're a very technology savvy group of people and that's driven a lot of the mobile adoption in the country," Banks said.

"We have 6 million active consumers in Australia and 110,000 businesses in the country accept PayPal. The consumers in Australia have always respected that PayPal is safe, and PayPal is easy.

Fusco said that where PayPal is currently investing its energies is in creating the types of experiences that accommodate the needs of customers, adding that the global ecommerce ecosystem is being totally rewired.

"We just want to be where our customers want to be; if that's chip-and-pin, well then we're going to enable those payments; if that's checking in with a mobile device and paying, then we're going to enable those as well; if it's a swipe at a point of sale or an online checkout using a digital wallet, we'll be there too."

In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion; PayPal then split from its parent company 13 years later and began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange in July.

"As an independent company, I'll tell you it's a very exciting time to be PayPal," Fusco said. "The direction we're taking PayPal we think is a very exciting one."

"Being an independent company has given us the opportunity to partner in ways we couldn't before and be very focused on being the world's preferred way to pay and be paid."

Eftpos launched its payments hub in September last year, and as of November this year reported seeing just shy of AU$3 million Eftpos cheque and savings transactions per day.

Last month, Dutch payments company Bell ID also teamed up with Eftpos to bring tokenisation to the domestic digital payments market.