PayPal snaps up mobile-payments start-up card.io

PayPal recently made a significant digital purchase of its own.

The mobile-payment service provider, which is owned by eBay, acquired card.io, a San Francisco start-up that enables users to use a smartphone camera to scan in their credit card information, according to a company blog post on Tuesday.

The two companies first connected while working on integrating the card.io technology into the PayPal Here app, according to the PayPal blog post. “While working with them, we were simply blown away by the creativity and drive of their employees,” wrote Hill Ferguson, PayPal vice president of global product.

So the card.io team will become part of the PayPal global product team in San Jose to help build out the PayPal digital wallet, Ferguson said in the post. (We’re assuming that the seventh member of the team listed on the card.io website -- Ziggy Stardust -- may get to keep the title of Chief Happiness Officer.)

This comes as PayPal has been expanding its reach from virtual digital exchanges to point-of-sale depots -- Home Depot and Office Depot, to be exact. Being able to easily ingest card information in a snapshot fits well within the ethos of this kind of cardless, cashless, walletless system that’s being nurtured by such companies as Apple and Google.

While PayPal is taking on the company’s team, its “current” technology will remain available to developers for their own apps, according to the blog post.

The amount of the deal with card.io wasn’t disclosed. And no word on whether they actually used PayPal to transfer those undisclosed funds.

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