PayPal announced Monday that it is partnering with MoneyGram, a money transfer company, to give PayPal users the option to deposit and withdraw funds from their accounts from many of MoneyGram's 284,000 global locations.
The goal of the partnership, according to PayPal, is to provide consumers and retailers with a quick way to turn "cash to commerce." Starting in early 2013, anyone with an e-mail or phone number will be able to transfer and receive cash at a MoneyGram location. Consumers can deposit cash into their account and use it to make a payment, effectively taking the place of a prepaid card, while retailers can use the service to quickly gain access to cash from their transactions if necessary.
"This latest initiative with MoneyGram is another example of how we're enabling our digital wallet to work across multiple platforms and devices, online and offline, in order to offer consumers more control, flexibility and functionality when interacting with their money," Dan Schatt, PayPal's head of financial innovations, wrote on the company blog.
For PayPal, the partnership is part of an ongoing effort to expand its footprint offline. Earlier this year, PayPal inked a deal with Discover so that retailers can accept PayPal payments in stores (also starting in early 2013).
Indeed, PayPal recently launched its first national advertising campaign to re-educate consumers about the range of ways they can use PayPal in their day-to-day lives — beyond just making payments online. As the company's senior director of global communications explained in a blog post shortly before the campaign launched, "PayPal is expanding our core product to solve problems for consumers, merchants, developers and advertisers — not just trying to re-create a wallet that we already invented 14 years ago."
Image courtesy of Flickr, 401(K) 2012
http://mashable.com/2012/10/22/paypal-expands-offline-presence-with-moneygram-partnership/
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