NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, September 27, 2013

EBay Inc. will buy payments service Braintree Payments Solutions LLC for $800 million in cash, making a big bet to secure the pole position in the race to get consumers to pay for goods and services on smartphones,

The deal will give eBay’s PayPal unit more extensive customer data as well as the lucrative transaction fees from Braintree’s expanding network, which currently processes more than $12 billion in payments annually, a third of which is on mobile devices. Braintree charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.

Braintree is one of the faster growing payments companies in a crowded field that includes Stripe Inc., Square Inc., Google Inc. GOOG -0.47% and others. Just two years ago it was processing $3 billion annually. Part of its appeal is its client list that includes tech firms such as transportation company Uber Technologies LLC and lodging reservation service Airbnb Inc.