“If you’re someone who’s buying products on the web, we know who is buying the products where, and we can leverage the data,” Grether said in a statement to the WSJ. He also said that PayPal will receive shopping data from customers using its credit card in stores.
A PayPal spokesperson tells the WSJ that the company will collect data from customers by default while also offering the ability to opt out.
PayPal is far from the only company to sell ads based on transaction information. In January, a study from Consumer Reports revealed that Facebook gets information about users from thousands of different companies, including retailers like Walmart and Amazon. JPMorgan Chase also announced that it’s creating an ad network based on customer spending data, while Visa is making similar moves. Of course, this doesn’t include the tracking shopping apps do to log your offline purchases, too.
As much as I’d like PayPal to have competition, I’ve seen the share chart and there’s a flexion just this month (not a so small one, but it’s just a month).
What the EU has done with instant bank transfer is great, but I think that the 15 seconds limit is too much for that function to be used by other apps (Satispay) to transfer money. I mean, 15 seconds is nothing, but waiting in line at the supermarket standing still for 15 seconds will fill an eternity!
The 15 seconds are more like a maximum. It’s usually faster. Taking out you phone and maybe entering the phone PIN, opening the banking app and entering a PIN for that takes some time, too.
The advantage that Paypal still has: It’s like a social network. People are connected and it might be easier to use it instead of first asking people for their IBAN code to send the money…