Tag Archives | PayPal

Visa Moves in On PayPal’s Turf with Payment Service

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 16, 2011 at 9:12 pm

PayPal is about to get some competition from one of its own partners as Visa announced a new personal payments service on Wednesday. The offering would allow anyone from a participating bank to send payments directly to any Visa account, whether it be a credit, debit, or prepay card.

Visa said it needed to make some changes to its backend to allow its partners to accept incoming payments, as well as changes to the network itself. The creditor has partnered with CashEdge and Fiserv to handle the person-to-person transactions — Visa itself would not be directly involved.

To send a payment, the payer would need to know the payee’s 16-digit Visa account number, e-mail address, or phone number. Once sent, the payment would show up in the users account. This could be used in a number of ways — for example, making sure your child at college has money on his prepaid Visa, or that friend paying you back for that item you charged to your Visa credit card, etc.

Visa says the payment service should be available from participating financial institutions beginning in the second half of this year.

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PayPal’s iPhone Check Deposit: It Works!

Posted by Jared Newman on October 7, 2010 at 1:12 pm

PayPal added check deposit capabilities to its iPhone app on Wednesday, and hey, I just got a check in the mail. Let’s see how PayPal handles the job.

Before you start, PayPal hits you with a bunch of disclaimers. You’ve got to keep the check for 15 days, just to make sure nothing goes wrong, and you can’t deposit more than $1,000 per day or $3,000 per month. So if your employer cuts checks instead of offering direct deposit, PayPal might not be able to handle your earnings. PayPal’s deposit feature seems best-suited for those nagging little checks that aren’t worth the effort of going to a bank.

Depositing a check through PayPal is simple enough. Under the “tools” section, you press “Add Money From Checks,” and then snap a photo of the check’s front and back sides. Then, you must enter in the amount of the check. (Or, at least I did. The handwriting on my check was a little messy, so I’m not sure whether PayPal ever tries to guess the amount, like some smart ATMs.)

Deposits take roughly six business days to show up in your account, PayPal says. Unfortunately, there’s no option to automatically pass the check on to your bank account. You’ve got to transfer it yourself, which usually takes another three or four business days.

Ideally, my own bank, Bank of America, would offer check deposits through its iPhone app. Chase and State Farm Bank already do, and USAA supports deposits the iPhone and Android phones. If you’re not a customer of those banks, and you’ve got an iPhone, PayPal provides a decent workaround as long as you don’t need the cash right away.

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eBay Looking to Expand PayPal's Reach

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 9, 2009 at 10:08 am

PayPalWith its auction business struggling, eBay is turning to its Paypal arm for salvation. According to an BusinessWeek article, the company plans to use its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday to focus on its plans for its payment arm.

New eBay CEO John Donohoe has already said that he believes PayPal will overtake its auction revenues in the not-too-distant future. That wouldn’t be hard to believe either: even with PayPal’s popularity as an online payment medium, here in the US where it used the most, only 12 percent of all online payments are processed through the service.

Obviously PayPal has a lot of room to grow. So how is eBay going to do it? By going after those companies and organizations that use online payments everyday. Charities and organizations rely on a lot of online donations, and some government services allow for online payments of taxes, bills, and fines. Both could easily integrate PayPal into their offerings.

In addition, the service plans to offer an SDK of sorts to encourage developers of e-commerce apps to fully integrate paypal into their offerings, such as Apple has within iTunes. This could also increase the company’s share of online payments.

With people moving away from credit cards with the recession, using services like PayPal may make sense. Like the BusinessWeek article infers, people only want to spend the money they have. Expanding at a time like this could pay dividends later as people get used to using the service regularly.

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