PayPal Wants Role in Apple’s Mobile Payments Dreams

Apple may finally appear serious about facilitating the purchase of physical products in retail stores through its devices -- and that has gotten the attention of at least one potential major competitor.

Three payments industry executives said that eBay-owned PayPal has been pitching Apple on helping the consumer electronics maker bring its long-rumored payments initiative to fruition. These people, who have spoken to contacts at both Apple and PayPal, say that PayPal is essentially willing to white-label parts of its payment service to be used in an Apple mobile payments system -- anything from fraud detection to back-end infrastructure, even possibly down to the processing of payments.