Mariam Sharp concludes a three-part report into new mobile payment innovations with a look at and developments at PayPal and Twitter

In a recent article titled Bitcoin buzz: is this the next big disruptor in the travel space? Alina Popescu interviewed Expedia. “We want consumers to have more choice and greater flexibility in the way they interact with us,” Michael Gulmann, VP of Global Product, Expedia said.

Right now, however, Expedia is focusing on offering Bitcoin to hotel customers and does not have plans to expand into accepting the currency for other transactions. Another player in the Bitcoin space is CheapAir. Since November 2013, it has sold airline tickets, hotel rooms, and Amtrak tickets worth $1.5 million. Although Bitcoin sales still amount to just 1% of CheapAir revenues, it believes this represents a future opportunity. But there have also been short-term benefits.

"In the short term, being the first to accept Bitcoin has helped us introduce new customers to CheapAir that otherwise may never have tried out our service,” says Jeff Klee, CEO of CheapAir.com. Another plus is that the community “has been very supportive and very loyal”.

Although crypto-currencies have been around for some time, only Bitcoin has achieved significant scale and increasingly people are asking lots of questions about how it will work – including how and if PayPal will decide to work with Bitcoin.

Last month PayPal announced its next step in helping merchants accept Bitcoin payments. The reason this is significant is because until PayPal’s involvement, Bitcoin did not have a trusted distribution system. PayPal has entered into agreements with leading Bitcoin payment processors BitPayCoinbase and GoCoin. These agreements let PayPal digital goods merchants accept Bitcoin with a simple integration through the PayPal Payments Hub. This will be available to merchants in North America first.

On its website PayPal has this to say: “We chose to work with BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin because of our commitment to offering innovative and safer ways for businesses to accept payments.”

According to PayPal, all three companies have taken steps to get to know their customers and to offer relevant protection. PayPal also says it's a fierce advocate of giving businesses - and in turn their customers - flexibility and the freedom of choice.

Earlier this month PayPal announced that businesses working with Braintree, which in the travel space include Airbnb and Uber, will soon be able to accept Bitcoin as a payment option through their relationship with Coinbase.

Just to clarify, this does not mean that PayPal has added Bitcoin as a currency in their digital wallet or that Bitcoin payments will be processed on their secure payments platform. Like other early adopters PayPal are proceeding gradually, supporting Bitcoin in some ways and holding off in others to see how things develop.

With Ebay’s plans to spin off PayPal (which accounted for 41% of revenues in 2013) in 2015, it could be freed up to build partnerships with e-commerce rivals and increase market share from payment startups like Stripe, which launched its own mobile payments initiative last month.

Touching on Twitter

While there is plenty more to say about payments, the last on our list in this three-part series (see Part 1 and Part 2 here) is Twitter. It’s also in the payments race with other tech giants to gain a foothold in new payment services for mobile phones or apps. They are collaborating and, in some cases, competing with banks and credit card issuers that have run the business for decades.

Twitter is to team up with Groupe BPCE, France’s second largest bank, to allow customers to transfer money via tweets. The move coincides with Twitter’s own push into the world of online payments as the social network seeks new sources of revenue beyond advertising.

“(S-Money) offers Twitter users in France a new way to send each other money, irrespective of their bank and without having to enter the beneficiary’s bank details, with a simple tweet,” says Nicolas Chatillon, chief executive of S-Money, BPCE’s mobile payments unit. 

Last month, Twitter also started trials of its own new service, called Twitter Buy, which will allow consumers to find and buy products on its social network. The service embeds a Twitter Buy button inside tweets posted by more than two-dozen stores, music artists and non-profit organisations. We talk about what this could mean for travel here.

What’s becoming more apparent is that the role of social media is moving beyond customer service and marketing and positioning itself to drive revenue activity across a wide range of organisations - it’s this aspect that makes it game changing.