PayPal eyes $3bn from m-payments

Electronic payment company PayPal has increased its estimates of the amount of money processed by mobile payments transactions, doubling the estimate to $3 billion in mobile total payments volume in 2011, reports The Washigton Post.

The electronic payment company says the rate at which people are using the payments technology to buy items via their mobile phones is rapidly growing, and this is the third time the company has had to update its numbers.

At years end in 2010, PayPal predicted $1.5 billion in mobile payments and in February, the company revised this to $2 billion.

The Wall Street Journal Online says the $3 billion in mobile payments is broken down into two categories. The first is individuals using PayPal's mobile app to transfer money to each other. The company doesn't make any money on this feature, except for cross-border transactions that carry a small fee.

The second category is people completing purchases on mobile online commerce sites using PayPal. The company collects a fee for each sale through PayPal.

PayPal says it now has eight million users and is seeing up to $10 million a day in mobile total payment volume.

Aided by its growing mobile payments business, PayPal revenue grew 23% in the first quarter and hit almost a billion in revenue, making up 39% of parent company eBay's total revenue, reveals Bloomberg Businessweek.

A number of mobile payment start-ups are gearing up to compete against PayPal mobile payment service, including search engine giant Google, with its Google Wallet offering, Square, Intuit, mobile carriers, and major credit-card companies.