PayPal mobile payments going mainstream, worth $700m this year

PayPal is upbeat about its future as it eyes the potential of becoming your “Wallet in the Cloud” for everyday, real-world purchases in bricks-and-mortar shops.

We’re at LeWeb in Paris where PayPal’s President of Platform, Mobile and New Ventures, Osama Bedier has just been speaking to The Telegraph’s Milo Yiannopoulos. The company has research to say that almost half of all real-world purchases are influenced by the web. Now offline merchants are asking for PayPal to capitalize on this by allowing payments for offline purchases to easily be taken online while customers are in the store.

When will this happen? Bedier is looking at a five year timescale before it becomes mainstream behaviour to leave your cash at home and pay for goods with your “cloud-based wallet” using your mobile phone.

The company is on track to handle $700m in mobile payments this year, and Bedier only sees that increasing as location-based services and Augmented Reality apps become more popular, helping consumers bridge the gap between online and offline shopping.

Aside from the public getting used to the idea, legislation for online payments is a murky area right now – many countries currently lack any laws at all to cover the area. However, Bedier says that authorities in some countries are actively contacting PayPal, asking for its help in preparing laws that will help facilitate easy online payments in the real world.