That’s how long it took for PayPal to incorporate Card.io’s image capture credit card installation feature into its mobile service. PayPal released an update of its iPhone mobile app yesterday that included Card.io’s core offering.
PayPal acquired Card.io on July 17.
Specifically, Card.io allows users to snap a photo of their payment card to upload its data. It’s a handy way to enter 16-digit credit card numbers. You can tell that the new feature was just slapped in quickly, because in the new release of the PayPal iPhone app (v4.1 and v4.1.1) that was made available yesterday, the “Add Card” feature is buried in the Profile section of the app, rather than in the main screen from the balance display, which is at the center of the app and which includes an RDC scanning feature.
But that’s a small quibble. The Card.io feature makes the PayPal app that much more appealing to customers, and that should enhance acquisition and retention for PayPal. And that is not a pleasant fact for Google Wallet, which continues to hit speed bump after speed bump. The latest black eye for Google Wallet is from American Express. From VentureBeat:
Although you can now load an American Express card onto Google Wallet, AmEx wants to make sure consumers know that it’s not an American Express-approved product.
Bradley Minor, an AmEx spokesman, said that the company is in talks with Google and is evaluating Google’s new product to see if it meets AmEx’s standards for data transparency. American Express’s name was used in Google’s blog post about the launch without the company’s approval.
No response from Google to this one yet.