PayPal Newsroom: Introducing PayPal Everywhere

customers can now add their PayPal Debit Card to Apple Wallet in just a few steps and use it with Apple Pay, enabling even more ways to pay.

PayPal is a pioneer in digital wallets, they’re one of the biggest wallets in the world today, and Apple is just about to let them enable tap-to-pay in their iOS app and even become the default wallet on iPhones. They’re unquestionably one of the companies most likely to successfully get people to switch to from Apple Wallet.

And yet they just announced their debit card can be added to Apple Wallet.

As I keep saying, the incentive for payments companies is to get as many people running as many transactions through them as humanly possible. That means making those payments easy, secure, and everywhere.

I’m sure there will be exceptions similar to GM foolishly deciding to ditch CarPlay and Android Auto, but I still fully expect them to be just that, exceptions.

And the beauty of contactless payments is that Apple Pay is using standard industry tech to communicate with card readers, so if I decided to switch to PayPal’s wallet one day and tap my phone at my local grocery store, that store shouldn’t have to update anything in their payment system to take this different wallet. It should, and I’m not sure who said this first, just work. Apple is undeniably an innovator in payments and they make great products in the payment space, but we sometimes forget lots of it is built on standard payment rails.