PayPal And Mastercard Announce New Strategic Partnership

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Mastercard and PayPal have inked a strategic partnership similar to the one that PayPal and Visa inked earlier this year.

As part of this partnership, Mastercard will be presented as a visible payment option to PayPal customers, with prominent issuer branding, implying that PayPal will no longer encourage Mastercard customers to link their bank accounts to PayPal via ACH. Mastercard issuers will also continue to receive transaction-level data for Mastercard transactions that occur inside of PayPal wallets.

PayPal will get the benefit of expanded in-store payments capabilities via NFC by participating in Mastercard’s digital token services. That means that consumers with tokenized Mastercard accounts inside of PayPal wallets can use them at the more than 5 million merchant locations now equipped with NFC terminals.

In a bid to expand acceptance of Masterpass, it will become a payment option for all Braintree merchants, which will make it easier for developers to add Masterpass as a payment option in-app and online.

Most notably, PayPal will no longer be subjected to the digital wallet tax and will be afforded financial volume incentives.

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman is quoted as saying that the partnership underscores PayPal’s broader strategic goals as an enabler of consumer choice and payments ubiquity.

“Customer choice and partnership are fundamental principles for PayPal that guide how we operate as a company, giving our customers greater opportunities to more easily manage and move their money online, in-app and in-store,” said Schulman.

Mastercard president and CEO Ajay Banga also noted that expansion of the card network’s relationship with PayPal demonstrates the firm’s desire to support its customers’ payment choices in as wide a variety of contexts as possible.

“The expansion of the partnership with PayPal further reinforces our commitment to our billions of cardholders across the globe to provide them the choice to pay when, where and how they want, while delivering the simple and secure payment experience they’ve come to expect from Mastercard.”