eBay’s PayPal unit has completed its acquisition of payment services firm Braintree and will begin offering PayPal as a payment option to Braintree’s merchant customers in 2014. PayPal acquired Braintree for $800 million in cash in a deal announced in September.
PayPal President David Marcus said it was an ideal moment to combine the resources of the two companies “given what’s going on in the industry as we head into 2014.” He believes the world is entering a period of far-reaching disruption that will revolutionize money.
And while he called the long-term potential endless, “our immediate focus is simple and straightforward. Now that the deal is complete, we’re focused on working together to serve our customers by supporting the great services and solutions that they rely on today while we learn from each other and gain from each other’s strengths.”
Braintree enables web and mobile payments, charging 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, and also offers a mobile application called Venmo that gives people an easy way to pay each other using their mobile devices and leveraging social networks. Braintree processes $4 billion in mobile payments annually (a third of its $12 billion total annual payment processing), compared to the more than $20 billion in mobile payments PayPal expects to process this year.
Marcus said PayPal would continue to support Braintree’s Venmo service and would look to Braintree’s engineers” to help us quicken the pace of progress and innovation in our far-ranging efforts in mobile payments.
Braintree plans to begin offering PayPal as a payment option to its merchant customers in 2014, and Marcus noted that Uber is the first Braintree merchant to integrate the new PayPal Mobile SDK.
Not all Braintree customers were pleased to hear news of the acquisition when it was announced 3 months ago, expressing some concern over the level of service PayPal provides to customers and stories of account freezes, see the Braintree blog for that reaction. The full post by David Marcus is found on the PayPal blog.
