PayPal to move into in-store payments ‘next year’

While it has struggled in the past to convert its success online into a presence in physical retail stores, PayPal is planning another go at it. During an „Axios on HBO” interview, CEO Dan Schulman said that the company will make new efforts starting next year under both the PayPal and Venmo brands.

PayPal thinks it can succeed now even though it has struggled in the past.

Schulman said that Paypal didn’t have much to offer as a simple alternative to a credit card, but it can offer more in a world where people want to use reward points, split payments or even bypass the checkout line entirely.

„Before it was kind of a a a solution in search of a problem,” Schulman said. „What I’m beginning to see right now is so that you can do different things now by tapping a phone. … And as a result, you’ll see PayPal increasingly become a part of the physical world as well as the digital world.”

Schulman was short on details, but mentioned that QR codes could play a role, especially with small and micro businesses, while PayPal can also tap into the NFC transactions already accepted for things like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

“QR codes are something that, more and more, micro and small businesses will start to use. And the relationships we now have with all of the networks and all of the major financial institutions allow us to use industry standard tokenization and NFC capability, which is what Google Pay and others use.

“We can actually simply put in a PayPal Wallet experience for physical stores and anywhere those other wallets are accepted — it’s exactly the same technology, it’s near field communications technology — we’ll be able to use those as well.”

“It should be both PayPal and Venmo that’ll be able to go do that and we’ll start to roll that out as early as next year.”