19 November 2007

PayPal, a leading payments service provider, closely associated with eBay is set to release a convenient way for its customers to make payments on websites that don't accept PayPal directly.
The new software utility, known as PayPal Secure Card, recognises when a user opens an e-commerce checkout page and automatically helps the user fill out the payment form in a secure way that also offers advanced fraud protection.

The system works through a partnership with credit card issuer MasterCard. Secure Card generates a unique MasterCard number each time a PayPal user arrives on an e-commerce sales checkout page that does not otherwise accept its payments. Secure Card is said to feel and look like just another PayPal purchase to the customer.

Secure Card has been tested by three million PayPal customers in the past year. The plug-in will be available to USA customers on the 20th of November 2007, with international customers to follow.
When a PayPal customer wants to pay for something on a site that doesn't normally accept PayPal payments, users click a downloaded PayPal button on their browsers to generate a unique, single-instance Secure Card transaction number.

Because the PayPal software resides on the user's computer, Secure Card can detect when users visit e-commerce sites. The software then automatically fills in their stored financial information, requiring just a few more clicks to authorise a transaction.

PayPal stores no details on the local computer for security reasons. Instead, it logs Secure Card activity in the user's account on central computers for safety and record-keeping. Secure Cards work on Windows computers running either Internet Explorer or Firefox. Users of Apple's Safari browser have only partial access to the service.

Usage of PayPal on the web is growing at nearly twice the speed that it is on eBay and the new service will help further accelerate this growth beyond the tens of thousands of merchants who already accept PayPal payments.

In the third quarter ended September, transactions through web merchants grew 61% to $5.38billion (£2.62billionn) from a year ago, while overall PayPal transaction volume grew 34% to $12.22billion over the same period.


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