PayPal has an advantage over another big Internet player, Google, in rolling out payments at the physical point of sale because it already has tens of millions of payments customers on file with billions in their accounts “ready to spend,” contends Don Kingsborough, PayPal’s vice president for retail and prepaid products.
Kingsborough, speaking alongside representatives of other major payments companies, including Google, last Tuesday on a panel, “Digital Wallets–the Battle for Consumer Mindshare,” at the Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas, Nev., said he believes there won’t be room for numerous mobile or other digital wallets in consumers’ pockets.
“I don’t think there are going to be 20 wallets out there or 30 wallets out there that win, but there will be more than one,” he said. “And I think PayPal is well-positioned because we solved one of the problems, and one of the problems Google is going to have is, 'how do you get customers to adopt?' That takes time. We already have 117 million people that have $6 billion in their account today ready to spend. That’s an advantage.”
