PayPal has struck a deal with Chinese payments firm UnionPay that means European merchants will be able to accept payments directly from Chinese buyers. You can read the statement here.
As Braintree (a PayPal company) notes: “As China’s most dominant card, the addition of UnionPay will help us unlock the access to this segment of consumers for Braintree merchants. Our offering of UnionPay is unique to the industry, designed to remove friction in the checkout process without complex re-direction of pages. Accepting UnionPay card consists of an easy one-time enrollment, and from then on, the experience is seamless. Simply put: we provide the APIs that allow our merchants to design the experience exactly the way they want it without having to worry about — something that we always strive to offer.”
This is big news for anyone wanting to sell more into China and it opens up payments from hundreds of millions of Chinese buyers. It’s also a cunning deployment of PayPal’s Braintree technology that once again proves that the acquisition there was a wise won.
PayPal’s going pretty well at the moment, last week they announced that One Touch was the “most rapidly adopted product in PayPal’s history.”
And if you want an analysis of PayPal’s business in 5 handy graphs, this is very readable.
