If you were wondering why PayPal snapped up the payments processor Braintree, today’s news should make it clear.
Braintree today unveiled its new “v.zero SDK,” which finally adds PayPal support alongside its usual payment processing options. The goal? To make PayPal something that’s readily available to developers without the need to integrate it separately.
“When we say what the absolute best way to integrate PayPal is, this is going to be it,” Braintree CEO Bill Ready told VentureBeat in an interview. PayPal isn’t yet retiring its existing mobile API, which saw huge improvements over the last year, but it’s going to push the new Braintree SDK as the preferred way to integrate PayPal payments.
Ready announced the news at our MobileBeat 2014 conference in San Francisco this morning. The new SDK is available today in the U.S. and will soon roll out to other countries.
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Consumers will also be able to save their PayPal credentials within apps for future use, something that PayPal first integrated with its previous mobile API. The overarching strategy isn’t too difficult to suss out: PayPal is aiming to establish itself even further as the ideal digital payments solution by being available practically everywhere.
The next time you download a new app, there’s a good chance you’ll just plug in your PayPal credentials and choose to pay with your credit card linked through Paypal rather than inputting your credit card directly into the app.
Ready says the v.zero SDK is also far easier for developers to implement. They only need to drop in 10 lines of code to get a complete checkout form. The process takes just five minutes. Braintree has also optimized the SDK for future upgrades (so developers probably won’t have to do much as new features roll out).
The first companies using Braintree’s new SDK include GitHub, ParkWhiz, Chargify, and Jane.com (which says it’s already seeing 11 percent of sales coming through PayPal). Twilio will also be integrated the new SDK over the next few weeks. Looking ahead, Ready says we’ll see even more combined announcements between PayPal and Braintree. And now that mobile is increasingly establishing itself as the primary new computing model, he expects to see context-driven experiences becoming more essential over the next decade.
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