Microsoft is the latest company to partner with PayPal and will enable P2P money transfers on Skype’s mobile app. The feature will be enabled in 22 countries – United States, United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.
The feature will initially be rolled out to Skype customers on the latest version of Skype for iOS and Android mobile devices.
TechCrunch points out that this isn’t the first time where PayPal tried to introduce money transfers on Skype. In 2007, when Skype was still owned by eBay, and it had still yet to spin-off PayPal as a separate entity, it had introduced the feature to send money via desktop.
No word if PayPal will be extending the payment option to users in India. The move takes significance as Skype’s biggest rival in India, WhatsApp, is looking to enable P2P payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Meanwhile, Hike Messenger became the first messaging service to introduce UPI payments through its Hike Wallet. The wallet allows users to perform bank-to-bank transfers. The transfer can be carried out even if the recipient isn’t on Hike Messenger. In case one doesn’t have an active bank account (read students) or doesn’t wish to use your bank account, wallet-to-wallet transfers can be carried out as well.
Partnerships with Slack, Outlook and Siri
PayPal has been actively pushing partnerships and is looking to become an operating system for payments. It’s latest deals include P2P payments via Apple’s Siri through Venmo, a payment bot for Slack to send money from an Outlook email account.
Paypal’s approach to partnership is to look at ARPU and not at earnings per transaction: In the last call, the company said that they’ll have some transactions where they’ll make a good margin, and others where they have zero cost and zero revenue, but drive more usage of Paypal.
