In the five years since payments company PayPal acquired Braintree, a comprehensive payment platform, it has seen over $500 billion in payment authorization volume and over 6 billion transactions this year alone, Juan Benitez, general manager at Braintree, told Bank Innovation. This, in part, is due to clients like Airbnb, Uber, and GrubHub, and represents a 54% year-over-year growth.

And while in 2019 Braintree wants to maintain this growth momentum, the focus will also be on certain innovation initiatives. In this latest episode of Fintech Unfiltered, Benitez explains the three most important areas of focus for Braintree.

1. APIs:
“We were the first to introduce native mobile SDKs for payments,” Benitez said. “Now, we want to optimize even further.” One way Benitez plans to do that is by enhancing its recently introduced GraphQL, a solution for API providers, developers and customers.

“It basically changes the role of interaction,” he explained, by allowing developers to customize the bidirectional flow of data attributes. This allows for highly customizable products and services for Braintree’s client, who can then give their customers more streamlined offerings.

Braintree’s innovation team will also build on tokenization capabilities which will allow it to optimize latency for their merchant customers. Benitez explained that Braintree will build on tokenizing mobile payments methods so merchants in different international markets can transact more seamlessly and quickly in local currencies.

2. Payouts:

Braintree will spend 2019 expanding on payout capabilities, including remittances.

“While PayPal and Braintree together have optimized a lot on how to have merchants have access to all the payment methods that are relevant to pay in, marketplaces and more merchants as a whole, are looking for ways to do remittances and payouts much more effectively,” Benitez said.

This was the thought behind the acquisition of payouts platform Hyperwallet earlier this year, he explained, and Braintree is already working on adding various options to facilitate different payouts for its merchant customers.

Also See: PayPal Makes a Grab for Marketplace Payments with Hyperwallet Acquisition

3. Partnerships: This comes as no surprise, but Braintree via its parent PayPal will focus on increasing its payment rails and connections in different parts of the payment ecosystem, whether that’s card networks, acquirers, issuing banks or merchants. Not only will the focus be on gaining more partnerships, Benitez said, but also to create opportunities for these partners to optimize certain solutions and capabilities that PayPal uses internally while operating its two-sided payment network.

Aside from these three areas of focus, Benitez talked about emerging trends such as mobile devices becoming a POS device and other technologies that will be crucial to the payments landscape in 2019.

To listen to the full conversation, tune in to Fintech Unfiltered podcast below:

Founded in 2007, Braintree is a platform that powers mobile and online payments for commerce entities. PayPal acquired Braintree along with its P2P service Venmo for $800 million back in September 2013.