PayPal Acquires card.io

https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2012/07/paypal-acquires-card-io/

by v33ra • 14 years ago

91 54 14 years ago

thepaypalblog.com

Matt_Mickiewicz• 14 years ago

Smart move... now they just need to buy up SQUARE and iZETTLE.

Anybody know the price paid?

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I would be more hopeful that they would buy up zendesk or some sort of actually useful support competency. I really think the amazingly poor phone support on things when they go squishy from Paypal is holding it back big time.

dangrossman11• 14 years ago

All my experiences with PayPal's phone support have been fantastic, from handling ridiculous disputes from crazy customers, to getting information about services, to updating tax info for the 1099-K stuff. Given we only see maybe a dozen major 'PayPal fail' stories a year with 200+ million accounts, their record seems pretty good. Even the famous PayPalSucks forum attracts a handful of threads a month.

IOW, I think they're better than most people give them credit for, and above average among all the big corps whose support I've had to use.

Karunamon3• 14 years ago

>Smart move... now they just need to buy up SQUARE

No, no no no no, no, HELL no. Square is one of Paypal's only real competitors. And a real competitor is what Paypal needs to fix their horrid UI and customer service.

callmeed• 14 years ago

Personally, I'd rather Square and Stripe got married.

kyro• 14 years ago

Throw in Simple to complete that alliterative trifecta.

Volpe• 14 years ago

Isn't Stripe, a large number of ex-Paypal people?

dzohrob• 14 years ago

congrats to Mike and the card.io team!

mmettler• 14 years ago

Thanks Dave!

kategleason• 14 years ago

awesome!

sandfox• 14 years ago

Anyone else read the 2nd to last paragraph and giggle a bit:

>to get the opportunity to work on projects that will accelerate innovation at a scale that’s just not possible at a startup.

Since when have PayPal done anything innovative in the last few years. (I am genuinely interested in answers to this)

maratd4• 14 years ago

They haven't done anything innovative since they were acquired by eBay. Well, unless you consider freezing accounts and confiscating funds an innovative activity.

dangrossman11• 14 years ago

Since being acquired by eBay they:

* Lowered transaction fees for volume merchants from 2.2% to 1.9%

* Partnered with many of the largest payment gateways to add PayPal to their services

* Introduced PayPal mobile and NFC phone-to-phone payments

* Introduced micropayments

* Introduced two-factor authentication

* Got their European Union banking license and expanded to 100+ countries

* Began offering PayPal Buyer Credit (transactional lines of credit)

* Moved into retail stores, accepting PayPal at credit card terminals in-store

* Began offering a mobile card reader to accept payments into a PayPal account

* Introduced student accounts with parental controls

* Opened their API for development of peer-to-peer payment services

* Introduced virtual, one-time-use credit card numbers

* Began offering merchant gift certificates

* Introduced a "storefront widget" that could be embedded in websites

* Began offering SMS-based authentication

* Began offering a virtual terminal for manually keying in offline/phone orders

* Introduced PayPal Pro and the ability to store payment authorizations you can charge against in the future (i.e. a payment vault with permission controlled by the customer).

BallinBige2• 14 years ago

It's funny PandoDaily was just talking about the demise of PayPal too. http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/14/exactly-how-screwed-is-payp...

PayPal's payment volume grew 24% y/o/y to $34 billion' as well.. http://seekingalpha.com/article/513741-ebay-poised-for-paypa.... I hate to admit it, but PayPal is not going anywhere

kuida0r3• 14 years ago

Is there a lower resistance alternative for a general consumer transferring money to a friend over the web/mobile phone? I default to using PayPal since the chances of my friend having a Paypal account is higher than the newer services.

Sidnicious• 14 years ago

Venmo (agreed, it's a newer service and not everyone has an account yet, but it's the easiest/lowest friction one I've seen.)

BallinBige2• 14 years ago

sending money P2P with the paypal app is fairly friction-less. Either way - this is great news for an industry (Fin-Tech) that needs more alternatives and more transparency

eridius• 14 years ago

I've been experimenting with Dwolla lately. They charge $0.25 per transaction over $10 (and nothing for under $10). The downside is they skip credit cards and go straight for your bank account so you a) need to hook up your bank account to them (which I did for PayPal anyway), and b) unless you have money hanging out in your Dwolla account, paying someone takes 3 days for the bank transfer to clear (which, again, is going to happen with PayPal anyway if you use a bank and don't run a balance, like me).

My only real problem with Dwolla is their iOS app sucks, and their website isn't a whole lot better. But I've had no problems with their actual service, although I've only transferred a few hundred dollars so far.

zacharyvoase• 14 years ago

card.io is pretty cool—I wasn't aware of it until now.

I’m just shocked at how poor the security of the entire consumer finance system is, if you can accept payment just by taking a photo of someone’s card. I wouldn’t be surprised if professional credit card fraudsters had implemented this technology years ago (except with covert cameras).

A sincere question: what would stop you from photocopying someone’s card and using it to buy goods with this system? At least with Square you need a magnetic barcode, which might act as a very mild deterrent.

EDIT: FYI, I live in Europe, where we’ve had Chip & PIN-verified PoS transactions for a while now. Still not the best security, but at least it’s no longer trivial.

MetallicCloud• 14 years ago

At least in Australia, all you need to make a purchase with a credit card is the numbers and dates on the front, and the 3 digit security code on the back. Having a program extract these values automatically wouldn't make this any less secure.

saurik• 14 years ago

AFAIK, cards processed with card.io are processed as if they were "card not present" transactions, which have a different risk profile (and thereby different fee structure) than "card present" transactions (that requires some information that is on the magnetic strip that you can't just read off the card itself).

rogerjin• 14 years ago

The actual scan technology is very specific and hard if not impossible (with current tech) to implement on things like a photocopied card. A real card needs to be used.

mfkp• 14 years ago

Card.io essentially just types in the information on the front of the card for you (card number, cardholder name, expiration date). For most applications, you probably still need to type in the billing zip code and CVV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_security_code) found on the back of the card.

fcoury• 14 years ago

You can judge the complexity of a company when its blog domain is theCOMPANYblog.com instead of blog.company.com...

statictype• 14 years ago

a) You seem to use the word 'complexity' like it's a good thing. Maybe you meant 'sophistication'?

b) That sounds like a poor metric for sophistication. I remember someone mentioning (maybe patio11) that company.com/blog was better from a SEO perspective than a separate subdomain. Maybe they're showing more sophistication than you think?

TomGullen• 14 years ago

blog.company.com is a pretty big mistake from an SEO perspective

drtonyratliff• 14 years ago

PayPal needs to buy up the rest.

PayPal Acquires card.io

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