Uber And PayPal Extend Payment Partnership, Now In 19 Countries

TECHCRUNCH: PayPal teamed up with Uber back in 2013 to offer the U.S. taxi-hailing service’s customers additional payment options. The world has changed a lot in those 18 months — Uber is now present in over 300 cities with China set to soon become its largest market — so, with that in mind, PayPal and Uber have extended their partnership to cover an additional 9 countries worldwide.

Now, Uber riders in Canada, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland can use PayPal to pay for their trips without using a credit card. That’s in addition to those in Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, UK and the U.S. who have had that option since 2013.

The deal appears, at face value, to be a more significant one for PayPal than for Uber. While Uber is known for cash-less payments, which require its users to own a credit card, it is running its a cash payments test in India as it looks to extend its reach in emerging markets. In some respects, this PayPal integration acts like a halfway step for those without a credit card, although you’d suspect that a sizable number of people with PayPal accounts also own a credit card.

For PayPal, though, working with Uber is an opportunity to tap into its vast (and now very global) network of users to spur more new sign-ups or re-engage less active users.

In the case of China, local payment systems like Alipay and Baidu Wallet — Baidu invested in Uber— are the leading online payment solutions. Alipay, in fact, reportedly processes three times as many payments as PayPal, and it already works with Uber in China. PayPal just isn’t a thing in China.