PayPal Enables 'One Touch' Mobile Payments & Bitcoin Transactions

Just ahead of today’s highly anticipated mobile payments news from Apple, PayPal announced that it has enhanced its own mobile payments offering with the availability of “One Touch” mobile payments and Bitcoin transactions. Both new features, announced yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, aim to make PayPal’s user experience a more seamless payments experience and offer greater convenience for customers in choosing how they want to pay, according to the company’s announcement.

[For more of our coverage on mobile payments, check out: Digital Wallets: High Awareness, Low Adoption.]

The availability of Bitcoin transactions was made possible through a new partnership between Braintree, eBay’s payments processing subsidiary, and Coinbase, a digital Bitcoin wallet provider. Merchants and developers that have integrated the v.zero SDK from Braintree will be able to accept Bitcoin in the next few months, allowing their customers to pay with bitcoins in their mobile apps, the announcement said.

The One Touch payment feature will allow customers to buy items through mobile apps with one click by selecting PayPal as their payments option and clicking “agree” to authorize the payment, the announcement said. Users’ payments preferences will already be saved. They won’t have to enter a username or password, creating a quicker and more secure experience, since they won’t have to enter their payments credentials and save them in each shopping app they use. Mobile shopping apps that have already integrated PayPal’s One Touch include Stubhub and ParkWhiz. The feature is already available on iOS and is in beta version on Android.

Jonathan Camhi has been an associate editor with Bank Systems & Technology since 2012. He previously worked as a freelance journalist in New York City covering politics, health and immigration, and has a master's degree from the City University of New York's Graduate School ... View Full Bio