PayPal pays pals $800m for Braintree

PayPal, the dough-handling arm of online tat bazaar eBay, is buying rival payments portal Braintree for $800m in cash.

Braintree, founded in the US in 2007, specialises in mobile transactions and has nearly 200 employees working out of offices in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Braintree's CEO William Ready said today that "everything" and "nothing" had changed since a few weeks back when he denied that he would sell the firm to a competitor.

He insisted that PayPal's takeover of Braintree, whose systems help outfits process credit card payments, would not affect its business. He also stated that he looked forward to a beautiful corporate friendship. Ready said in a blog post:

[W]e’ll continue to provide excellent customer service, thoughtful risk management and great APIs. Our teams and our culture will remain intact since we’ll continue to set direction for both.

He added that the merger would allow Braintree to "expand more quickly around the world" and said that the opportunity to be part of PayPal was "too good to pass up".

Earlier this year Google binned its competing Checkout payments system, ditching it in favour of Google Wallet.

The acquisition is expected to complete later this year. ®