Payment: PayPal Bets on Instant Services, Too
On the crowded e-payment market, PayPal expands their range of merchants-dedicated products by way of standing out before rival services. They just launched a free service providing PayPal-affiliated merchants with immediate access to funds.
Funds Now may only apply to companies meeting some eligibility criteria: a verified account and six-month sales history with no incident. These criteria are assessed using data gathered by the payment platform.
Until recently, the amount of time prior to receiving a payment, and actually using these funds, could reach twenty days for merchants. Several fraud prevention checks had to be carried out. Merchants no longer have to wait several days to be sent their payment for a sale, since PayPal makes this amount available instantly. They relied on a newly acquired start-up, Simility, to build this service and associated fraud prevention features. Simility uses AI techs to speed up, or even remove this delay altogether. Payments may still take some time to proceed if the purchase seems fraudulent.
Funds Now has been available in Beta for free since this summer. It has just been expanded to more than one million businesses. This service with first be implemented in the US, the UK and in Australia, but will later cover other countries, too.
Comments – Adjusting payments to match new market realities
PayPal announced they now have 250 million active accounts (including 8.7 million in France), or 13 million additional users in just four months. Their P2P payment solution attracted more than two million users in France. The number of transactions per account also increased from 34.7 to 35.7 between Q1 and Q2 2018. The group introduces another service likely to secure their merchants’ loyalty, or more than 19.5 million accounts worldwide. PayPal helps them manage their cash flow more easily and meet their expectations in terms of real-time payment: a standard requirement as this trend keeps gaining ground over the months. This phenomenon should also be boosted by the ongoing Instant Payment implementations in Europe.
Just two months ago, the e-payment giant announced they were buying out Simility for 120 million dollars. Back then, they did not provide any information as to possible synergies, but these synergies are now obvious. By way of reminder, in 2016, Stripe launched Instant Payouts: a service enabling companies in the demand economy (Lyft, Instacart) to be sent their payments in a matter of minutes.