NFC Times Exclusive – No, PayPal is not supporting NFC, contrary to what has been widely reported by the content aggregator publications the past week, as part of its announcement of a deal with Vodafone.
The announcement last week said that the agreement would “enable millions of PayPal customers in Europe,” to make contactless payments with NFC phones loaded with the Vodafone Wallet at potentially “millions of retail outlets around the world displaying the contactless payment symbol.” UPDATE: But PayPal did announce Feb. 22 that an upcoming version of the app will support NFC starting in the U.S. and Australia later this year. It remains to be seen how it implements this app outside of Europe. END UPDATE.
While PayPal might eventually support NFC, in the case of its deal with Vodafone, it is only acting as funding source on the backend–no doubt for a prepaid proxy card application loaded onto Vodafone-issued NFC SIMs. Ironically, this proxy card uses Visa contactless technology to communicate with point of sale terminals, enabling transactions by rival PayPal.