EXCLUSIVE- Is the global expansion of the PayPal–Mastercard partnership the beginning of a standalone PayPal NFC app?

Could be. The partnership, announced last week, brings Mastercard into PayPal as a payment option across the globe — moving into regions like the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, among others — essentially enabling PayPal to access Mastercard’s rails wherever they like.

This means the original digital wallet will no longer “be steering customers to ACH,” Sherri Haymond, executive vice president, digital partnerships for Mastercard told Bank Innovation (though of course ACH will remain a payment option on PayPal).

The partnership enables both Mastercard Send, the company’s push payment platform, as well as Masterpass as a payment option for those merchants using Braintree within PayPal, according to Haymond.

But how does this relate to PayPal’s use of NFC?

Well, in recent years Mastercard has made a few strides in the use of NFC tokenization, which means that PayPal could enable contactless payments at the POS.

“PayPal will also be launching a wallet [with] contactless payments,” Haymond said . “The transactions [at the POS] won’t be PayPal transactions, they will be through Mastercard.”

The capability will appear sometime in 2018, according to Haymond. Haymond could not say whether it would appear in the original PayPal wallet, or as a standalone app.

A PayPal representative told Bank Innovation via email:

We will be gradually introducing NFC tokenization accessing the Mastercard network across multiple countries in 2018 and beyond.

There was also no mention of whether that would come attached to a standalone payment app in the statement.

However, it should be noted that a PayPal POS app leveraging contactless would certainly make quite an impression across payments, especially in countries where contactless is already well established, such as the U.K., where technology just passed its 10-year anniversary.