PayPal will share data, plug Visa in exchange for wider terminal acceptance

On Thursday, Visa and PayPal announced a new partnership designed to push Visa cardholders to link their credit and debit cards to their PayPal and Venmo accounts, eschewing the bank-owned Automated Clearing House (ACH) network that PayPal has long preferred to work with.

PayPal makes more money off ACH-based transactions because it doesn’t have to pay a cut of any transaction fees to a card network like Visa. But two months ago, Visa CEO Charlie Scharf expressed his displeasure with getting cut out of the payments process and vowed to “go full steam and compete with [PayPal] in ways that people have never seen before” if the digital payment platform didn’t start playing nice.

In today's partnership announcement, the two companies said that when a customer goes to sign up with PayPal or make a payment through the platform, Visa-network cards will be presented as “a clear and equal payment option” with ACH. In addition, PayPal said it promises not to “encourage Visa cardholders to link to a bank account via ACH,” and the company vowed to help Visa identify customers that could potentially change their current PayPal setup to route payments over Visa’s network.

On a financial call this afternoon, Scharf said that currently, "roughly half the transactions that run through PayPal run through a network, and we’re roughly half of that." Visa said it would pay out incentives to PayPal if it meets quotas for customer signups and transactions through Visa's network.

Besides Visa's incentive payments, PayPal stands to benefit from the deal with greater exposure in brick-and-mortar stores. Customers will be able to use PayPal’s contactless system at any Visa Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals that also accept contactless payments.

The agreement also notes that some data sharing about Visa-funded transactions will happen between PayPal and Visa, which the companies claim will reduce fraud risk. This was a point of contention between PayPal and Visa for a while. As Bloomberg noted, a sticking point between the companies involved “a lack of transparency from PayPal about what customers are buying with accounts linked to credit cards—data that is valuable to card issuers for fighting fraud.” For this information sharing, PayPal will get access to Visa’s tokenization services, which should reduce fraud on credit and debit cards on Visa’s network.

On a separate Thursday evening financial call, PayPal’s CEO Daniel Schulman said that he expected the deal to “drive incremental expense” for the company, but he said increased “customer choice” would ultimately serve PayPal’s business interests. Schulman added that “this is the new PayPal” and that the company was looking into doing deals like this with other partners.