The Battle Begins – Apple, Facebook, and Google take on PayPal

There’s a storm brewing in Silicon Valley, and it’s centered around a race to become the new standard for sending and receiving payments online. The world is changing and I’m pretty sure we’re all going to look back on things like credit cards and say, “wow, remember when you had to use one of those to pay for something?”

While PayPal has long been the way to pay and get paid online, Apple, Facebook and Google are chipping away at the market, and they are each gaining momentum. Last week eBay announced that it was going to split the two companies so that PayPal can operate on its own. Here’s a look at what Apple, Facebook, and Google are doing to out-innovate PayPal in the space it helped to create.

Apple Pay

The newest entrant to the payment game is the one that probably who PayPal is the most afraid of, Apple. In September the company announced Apple Pay and officially threw their hat in the ring. Given that Apple already has over 800 million registered users this is a massive market to move away from PayPal.

Google-Wallet

You might think that Google could just take this market and not look back but Google Wallet hasn’t been a runaway success. Google is the undisputed king of search but many of their forays into other spaces have not gone very smoothly.

“Google often jumps head-first into new projects, paddles around, and then decides whether it’s worth staying in,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst covering mobile for Gartner. “I don’t think Google would pull the plug on Google Wallet entirely, but they may be slowing down and regrouping.” (Source – CNET)

Of course the Android market is huge and this is where Google really has the opportunity to shine.

facebook-messenger

Over the last 24-hours hacked screenshots have surfaced showing friend-to-friend payments via Facebook messenger. Once this is released it will directly compete with PayPal, SquarePay and many others fighting in this subset of the online payment space. Facebook has 1.23 billion monthly active users which is not a bad head-start.

Just remember, these are still the early days, remember, it was not so long ago that a smartphone looked like this…

old-smartphone
Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton