PayPal Emerging As World’s “Fifth Payment Network”

On a potentially historic day for the network, PayPal announced a massive slate of new payments partners, including fifteen retailers, four “mid-market” software providers, and, most notably, two of the world’s three largest point-of-sale terminal manufacturers.

Perhaps the most transformative of those partnerships is with VeriFone, which gives PayPal access to more than a million physical points of sale. Eighty of the 200 largest retailers in the U.S. use VeriFone’s POS technology, the company says.

“They are essentially the emerging fifth payment network, and have a greater degree of flexibility and ability to innovate,” offered VeriFone Vice President David Talach on the new union. “The PayPal partnership is part of a larger strategy of advancing the commerce and payments experience that VeriFone enables.”

“This is about exposing PayPal services to consumers and making it easy for retailers to do this,” Talach added in reference to the deal. “For consumers to adopt PayPal, merchants must adopt PayPal. For merchants to adopt PayPal services, VeriFone and others must make it easy for them to do so.”

Speaking of merchants, PayPal named more than a dozen of those as partners, including Barnes & Noble, JC Penney, and Office Depot. Each of the 15 will “bring innovation and flexibility with PayPal’s offline payment and shopping solutions” to their customers, said PayPal President David Marcus on Thursday.

Those solutions include PayPal’s Access payment card, a statement said, as well as “empty hands” phone-and-PIN payments, at VeriFone terminals.

Leapset, ShopKeep, Vend and Erply are PayPal’s “mid-market” point-of-sale software partners. The four firms are said to have relationships with 50,000 businesses.

PayPal has 110 million active accounts in 190 markets around the world, and dominates online payments. Working with VeriFone, other new partner Equinox, and existing partner Ingenico, PayPal now has a tie to nearly 40 million payment terminals around the world, Marcus said.

PayPal’s total processed payment volume for 2011 was $118 billion. The company plans to surpass $7 billion in mobile payments processed this year.

Read the official press release from VeriFone here.

Read the release from Equinox here.