Not to be outdone by rival Stripe, Braintree announces Apple Pay support

Yesterday was a huge — huge! — day for Apple, as it unveiled new and bigger phones, its first smartwatch, and a new wireless, NFC-based payments system: Apple Pay.

Apple announced a long list of financial, retail, and tech companies that are helping it with Apple Pay. On the tech side, Stripe, a company enabling online payment processing , was announced as an Apple Pay partner, meaning that Stripe customers can integrate Apple Pay into their products.

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Now it looks like customers of PayPal-owned Braintree will be able to get in on the Apple Pay action too, according to blog post by the company. It writes:

…Tokenization is a well-known approach in the payment space where information such as credit card numbers are hidden by tokens that protect sensitive information. We have many years of experience processing such transactions with the wide array of processing partners we support, which includes most of the major platforms Apple suggests. As a result, we are fully capable of processing Apple Pay transactions should you choose to accept Apple Pay in your app.

What’s interesting here, is that yesterday, many commentators suggested that PayPal was being left in the dust by the Stripe-Apple partnership. Braintree is obviously trying to avoid this.

But that still remains to be seen. While Braintree merchants can add an Apple Pay button along with a Braintree/PayPal button, customers might end up gravitating towards the Apple Pay button — it doesn’t require a PayPal account, after all.

Earlier this week, Braintree announced support for Bitcoin through a partnership with Coinbase, which will enable shoppers to pay with Bitcoin (with their Coinbase wallet), and merchants to accept Bitcoin without actually dealing with it.