PayPal is all about partnerships these days.
As it did with Visa and Mastercard last year, the payments giant is working its way back into brick-and-mortar locations, and not just for its app, but for PayPal cards as well. PayPal offers prepaid cards at several retailers.
In an app update this week, Android Pay added a feature to “pay with a card other than your default.” That doesn’t tell us much, but an API teardown here suggests that Android Pay will soon enable the use of PayPal cards. Moreover, Visa Checkout will be supported as well.
The code suggests that contactless terminals will still have to support Discover in order to use a PayPal card through Android Pay (quite a chain, I know), but that works out, thanks to a recent deal: just last week, PayPal partnered with Discover, giving the payments giant access to Discover’s tokenization services. This means that PayPal customers now have the option to pay with their Discover cards via PayPal app, wherever Discover payments are accepted (similar to the “exclusive” deal with Visa, and the less exclusive one with Mastercard).
Visa Checkout integration with Android Pay has been in the works since October, when Visa first opened up its Checkout platform to digital wallets and payment app providers. “Google’s Android Pay will take advantage of this new open platform by offering Visa Checkout to their consumers for online purchases,” the company said in a statement at the time.
This is a promise that Google seems to have begun delivering on already.
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