/Interview/ Q&A: Osama Bedier
08/12/2009 | Filed under Discover > Interview
PayPal will soon be bigger than eBay, the auction site’s CEO recently admitted. VP of platform and emerging technology, Osama Bedier, explains what it can offer developers
.net: What exactly have you released so far and what will developers be able to do with the new set of APIs?
OB: On 23 July we released the first important API suite, which we called Adaptive Payments. It’s exposing a lot of our payment capabilities in an API form that can be used outside of the web. We also added a few key capabilities that developers had been asking for like split payments, so you can now send a payment to multiple recipients at the same time. This is very attractive to developers because there are a lot of business models that could benefit from the idea of taking a cut of a transaction.
We’ve also opened up some of our web authentication capabilities. If you use Checkout today, you have to go to the PayPal website to authenticate a transaction. That may work very well in a check-out flow on the web but in a mobile model or a game application it doesn’t work as well. So allowing authentication within context is also something we released to that limited beta group.
.net: What are the major challenges in applying the APIs?
OB: The biggest challenge by far is staying true to our brand promise. Safety, security and privacy have always been our top priorities but when you open up a platform, not only do you open it up to the developers but there is that risk of those that intend to do you harm. So depending on how well we know you and how well we trust you as a developer, we determine how much access we give you to that open platform.
.net: How does the Adaptive Payments API differ from Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service?
OB: Amazon is a retailer and a very successful one at that. They built some developer capabilities into Amazon Web Services and found a need to provide payment services to those developers. It’s only natural that they built some APIs for payment capabilities into that eco-system but it’s somewhat limited to that. I think Amazon’s scope is much narrower. We do payments and we do nothing but payments. We’ve been doing it for the last 10 years. We’re doing it in 190 countries and not just in the US where they do it. I think there are a lot of stark differences. They’ve released one API. We intend to go far beyond just money-moving APIs and give people a lot of other capabilities that are also needed to build their own applications and innovate and not have to worry about the restrictions that payment systems have.
.net: What’s the future of payments going to be like?
OB: Payments are going to change as we know them over the next 10 years. You’ll see cash and cheques dying because they’re expensive. Billions of dollars in the US are spent on just reprinting money and the cost of making a penny is now 1.2 cents. Cash is very inefficient. And the internet has allowed us to do things more efficiently, whether that’s shopping or checking on your finances. The expectations for convenience and efficiency from the common consumer have gone up significantly, too. And therefore money will move quickly towards electronic mechanisms.
But the interesting phenomenon that I see bridges all of that together is the mobile phone. Everyone is now saying it’ll become your wallet. I’m not sure that’s exactly the case. I think we’re your wallet in the cloud, not necessarily attached to any one mobile phone but accessible to you wherever you need it from any internet connected device. The mobile phone will be a big part of your physical buying or shopping experience. And it will be very web-based. Just look at some of the shopping comparison applications on the iPhone. There are applications that allow you to take a picture of the barcode and not only tell you the best price but, using GPS, how far away it is – you can imagine that payments should only be a click away from that.
Osama Bedier
Job PayPal VP of platform and emerging technology
Age 34
Education Bachelor’s degree in computer science from University of California
Previous career Various roles at eBay and PayPal since 2002. Prior to that was director of technology for DG Systems Inc/Starguide Satellite Systems and also senior manager for ecommerce at Gateway, Inc
Online www.paypal.com
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