PayPal Announces Adaptive Payments

PayPal, the payment system owned by eBay, has confirmed plans to launch a new API to give developers a simpler set of tools for including payment features in their applications. Called Adaptive Payments, some believe this is a response to the pressure from Amazon's own payment tool, Flexible Payments Service (FPS). The new API will be presented to a small audience on July 23 and there is no date for its release yet. The story was initially broken by TechCrunch, which managed to get a hold of some internal documents at PayPal, and has since been confirmed by official company sources.

“While we had not planned on the internal documents being shared this early, it is true that PayPal will be the first and only global payments platform open to third-party developers allowing them to easily monetize their ideas,” Osama Bedier, VP of platform and emerging technology at PayPal, said. “We believe that providing a global payments platform will open up countless opportunities for developers to innovate and create new revenue streams. We want developers worldwide to easily make money from their ideas,” Damon Hougland, senior director of the PayPal Platform, added.

The new payment system brings some new features to the platform giving users and developers much more flexibility in the way they make or handle payments. For example a user now has the possibility to send money to several receivers with just one payment, a feature called “Parallel Payments,” but also make “Chained Payments” where the money is first sent to one receiver who then sends part of the sum to one or several others down the line.

A feature that was previously unavailable to developers using PayPal is the possibility to become a payment aggregator, merging several transactions into a single larger one to reduce the cost of processing them, which was already possible with Amazon's FPS. The new API also adds support for micro-transactions, an important move opening the door for a multitude of new services.