PayPal Adds Experienced Mobile Team and Maybe a New POS Methodology

Mercator Overviews

by Mercator Advisory Group May 2, 2011 2:56 pm0

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Last week, PayPal acquired a talented pair of mobile point of sale developers and the company they were building. Max Metral and Hasty Granbery, individuals with considerable entrepreneurial and online privacy experience, are now PayPal employees. They’ve also built a nifty POS system that combines a smartphone-based app and a merchant POS app connected to a very low cost Wi-Fi or Bluetooth device dedicated to the Fig Card application.

Fig Card developed an extremely easy way for merchants to accept mobile payments in stores by using a simple and very low cost USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal. All the consumer needs is the Fig app on his or her smart phone. We loved their approach to point-of-sale, particularly because it was driven by the same vision that we have at PayPal – in the future, transactions can be as smart as a computer and not as dumb as paper. We won’t need our physical wallets. We’ll be able to pay any way we want, from any device, anywhere in the world with both flexibility and privacy.

It will be interested to see if, or how, PayPal enhances and deploys the Fig Card approach. As a scheme that relies on a stored payment account, the Fig Card system complements PayPal’s modus operandi.

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