PayPal is partnering with financial technology provider FIS and Citigroup in order to provide better, faster, stronger digital payments to all users involved—financial institutions, payment processors, and banking customers, it was announced today.
“It’s great that our clients can now extend this capability to their customers through PayPal,” says Doug Brown, senior vice president of Mobile at FIS. “Banking customers can register their account with PayPal, linking the accounts and can use PayPal for online, mobile shopping the way they normally do today.”
These partnerships are continuations of PayPal’s recent deals with the payment networks Mastercard and Visa.
FIS’s integration with PayPal will enable customers of participating FIS clients to add the payment card or account of their choice into an accompanying PayPal account.
The linked financial institutions will also have the option to make PayPal their default funding source, which should prove a reliable way to increase digital rate of spend.
“The banking customer will have a co-branded digital checkout experience,” says Brown–when checking out with PayPal, the banking brand will appear alongside PayPal’s, which will also potentially increase spend. “We believe people will feel more secure because their bank is a trusted brand–with PayPal they are seeing two trusted brands.”
FIS will enable the account linking offering with Avidia Bank and the 15 chartered banks of Wintrust Financial in early 2017; it will become available for all clients within the first six months of 2017.
PayPal currently reaches thousands of banks in the US alone, which now includes integration with Citi card users. With this new partnership, Citi cardholders will be able to link their card with their PayPal account, for payments in-store, online, and of course in-app.
The Citi card will be displayed as a payment choice within the PayPal Wallet, so all that users have to do to pay with their Citi card is to select that method.
Citi, which added a number of new capabilities to its mobile offerings this year—including the ability for cardholders to dispute posted charges in-app and track the progress of a replacement card, will be launching its mobile payment service Citi Pay early next year, and now those customers will have access to PayPal tokenization technology.
Citi told Bank Innovation:
Tokenization is a next-gen technology that protects the customer’s account number and authorizes transactions based on a unique token. Through our new agreement with PayPal, Citi cardmembers will be able to transact in-store via PayPal by using tokenization services from Mastercard and Visa.