There won’t be one mobile wallet to rule them all, Braintree CEO (video)

7 Nov 2014

Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree

Despite the current rivalry between Apple Pay and CurrentC in the US, a handful of mobile wallets vendors will emerge and co-exist, Braintree CEO Bill Ready predicted.

Ready’s company Braintree, a prominent player in the fluid mobile and web payments platform business, was acquired last year by PayPal for US$800m.

“We built a great online and mobile payments platform to make it easy for start-up and web developers to get access to sophisticated payment tools.

“We were the first in the industry to enable the one-touch payment solution and now we are changing the way people buy using PayPal. We have rolled out our system in the US and soon we will roll it out in Europe.”

Ready said Apple Pay’s arrival in the payment space is an interesting and welcome development that will push more people in the direction of using their smartphones as their primary payment device or wallet.

Speaking the Lingua Franca of the mobile wallet space

On the subject of the rivalry between Apple Pay and MCX, the platform behind the CurrentC consortium in the US, Ready said that in time there will be a variety of mobile wallets for people to choose from.

“There won’t be any one mobile wallet to rule them all, but four or five will continue to be relevant.

“PayPal is the most widely used and trusted wallet in the world. Apple’s coming extends the push to mobile payments.

“There will be a few players in the mobile wallet space. We are an open platform and can provide seamless access to any of those wallets.”

 

The Web Summit 2014: Interview with Bill Ready of Braintree

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com