PayPal Expands Google Pay Relationship

PayPal said Thursday (May 24) that it has expanded its partnership with Google Pay, with a focus on the United States, where users can pay for Google services directly using PayPal.

In a blog post, PayPal Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Bill Ready said that “soon, users in the U.S. who add PayPal to any one of Google’s services will be able to pay across the Google ecosystem, anywhere that PayPal is offered as a payment method, with only minimal setup.”

The additional functionality comes on top of an existing relationship where consumers can use PayPal to pay for in-store transactions, across online conduits, in app with Google Pay and on Chrome mobile web. Those payments come in tandem with device authentication, noted the blog post.

Ready wrote that users who add PayPal to their Google Play accounts “will automatically enable” the linked PayPal account as a payment option across Google service offerings, such as YouTube, Google Pay and Google Store.

Those users won’t need to login again to make payments, said Ready. U.S. users can also choose PayPal as an option where peer-to-peer payments are offered by Google.

The Thursday announcement deepens a partnership that has seen PayPal listed as a payment option on Google Play for the last four years.

The move also comes, as TechCrunch noted on Thursday, after Google rebranded its payments offerings to Google Pay earlier in 2018. The deeper integration with PayPal is slated to go live later in the year. That site noted the “new phase of the relationship” means consumers will be less likely to leave Google when it comes time to make a payment. On the PayPal side, said TechCrunch, there are now more options to use the payments system, likely to result in incremental transactions and revenues.