eBay scooped up behind-the-scenes payments company Braintree last year for $800 million, but in the ensuing ten months Braintree has continued to operate separately from eBay's big money-moving arm PayPal. That changes today, however, as PayPal and Braintree are officially joining forces. They're launching a one-stop payments shop targeting a broad range of developers from the smallest collaborative consumption startup to the established e-commerce portal.
The new program is called Braintree v.zero, and its key component is a modular software development kit that lets developers easily add any of PayPal or Braintree's payment services to a website or mobile app. That means a developer could do something as simple as plugging in a "Pay with PayPal" button into their website, said Braintree CEO Bill Ready, or they can sign up for more sophisticated features like Braintree's foreign currency conversion or multiparty transaction processing (i.e. when you split the fare on an Uber ride).
Braintree has always focused on startups, powering the back-end payments for companies like Uber and Airbnb since their formative stages. But Ready said v.zero and PayPal's broad reach is going to put it front of a lot more companies. As part of v.zero's attempts to go small, the SDK comes with a drop-in user interface, which will let tiny startups bring payments online after 15 minutes of work, Ready said.
"If you're a startup going after your first dollar of revenue, we're going to give you access to world class tools and save you weeks of work building your payments interface," Ready said. "There's also a big issue across the e-commerce industry. Many big sites don't have any experience in mobile. We can help them launch over mobile."
After the acquisition, Braintree and Ready took over PayPal's developer operations, but with the launch of v.zero will the two companies have officially merged their programs. Braintree customer Uber, for instance, recently made PayPal a fare option in the U.S. and several European countries, but Uber had to separately integrate with PayPal's APIs. One likely result of those move is that more Braintree merchants will start adding "Pay with Paypal" buttons to their websites and apps, Ready said.
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