Guest Post: PayPal's Praveen Alavilli on Web Payments and Funding

by Guest Editor - Mar. 18, 2010Comments (0)

On March 19th, in conjunction with PayPalX, Sun Microsystems, Embarkons.com and session sponsor Cooley Godward Kronish, developers, lawyers and financers will be gathering at the Peer Financing for Developers conference in Menlo Park, California. The goal of the conference is to examine new and innovative approaches to peer financing of projects.The half day conference will take place at Sun Microsystems' campus,and interested attendees can get tickets at peerfinancing.eventbrite.com.

As a follow-up to OStatic's initial guest post related to the conference, Praveen Alavilli, developer evangelist for the PayPal X Developer Network, has provided a guest post on how PayPal is attempting to help developers finance projects. Here it is.

On the Future of Web Payments and Funding

By Praveen Alavilli, developer evangelist for the PayPal X Developer Network

As the web and related technologies evolve, the requirements for making payments possible from applications have taken many different forms. The PayPal X Payments Platform provides a suite of APIs to enable developers to build applications that provision payments regardless of what platforms and devices they are running on, while hiding all the complexity in processing payments of different forms (Cards, ACH, etc.). We strongly believe that developers are the core component of our ecosystem and the applications they build are essentially going to change the way we pay.

To support them, we recently made several enhancements to our Sandbox that makes the development process much more easy and enables them to test various APIs in sandbox environment before going live. There were also a few enhancements added to the PayPal IPN service to provide ways for resending IPNs that are missed by the applications so they can provide a seamless User Experience. And lastly, we have announced support for Guest Accounts to be launched in July 2010, which would allow end consumers to pay from the applications even without a PayPal account.

We are also launching a new APEX toolkit for developers building applications on Force.com (an application platform on the cloud by Salesforce) and also working with IBM Cloud Labs to provide a way for developers to not only innovate on the IBM cloud, but to quickly monetize new applications developed and made available through their cloud on various platforms and mobile devices. The PayPal X Developer Portal has more information, new feature & functionality announcements, Xspaces, blogs, forums, and more.

The PayPal X Payments Platform provides several Adaptive APIs that enable applications and services to provision payments and accounts in several innovative ways. In addition to the traditional simple payments between Single Sender and Single Receiver, the new Adaptive Payments API provides ways to enable split payments between Single Sender and Multiple Receivers either as a Parallel or Chained process.

These split payments provide a very easy way for developers to monetize the services and functionality they are offering through their applications. For example with the use of Split Payments, a Social game developer can automatically take his cut from the in-app purchases for merchandise provided by a 3rd party seller. The Adaptive Payments API also provides a Preapproval method using which applications can preauthorize a user for a certain amount of money and transactions, and use it to charge the user in the future based on their usage or subscription model. This allows a premium content site to charge the user only when the user views premium content.   

The Adaptive Accounts API, on the other hand, allows developers to build applications that automatically provision PayPal accounts for their customers (either end consumers or Merchants/Sellers) which drastically improve the user experience. Application developers no longer need to worry about customer drop off during the payment process due to the lack of a PayPal account and they can make the PayPal account registration process seamless for the end consumer. And very soon the Adaptive Accounts API would provide a way to check the status of a PayPal account, which we are sure would make a lot more use cases possible.

As mentioned earlier, one of the core feature of the new PayPal X Payments Platform is the Split Payments model provided by the Adaptive Payments API. The Split Payments as mentioned earlier enabled payments between Single Sender and Multiple Receivers in either Parallel or Chained fashion. In Parallel payment, the money is transferred from the Sender account to one or more Receivers at the same time and the Sender has full visibility on who he/she is sending the payment to and the amount being transferred out of his/her account. In case of Chained Payment, the money is transferred from the Sender account to one or more Receivers at the same time but the Sender only sees the primary Receiver as the entity to whom he/she is sending the money to. All the Secondary Receivers do receive the money at the same time but they are hidden from the Sender.

In Peer-to-Peer financing, just as in any other financing models, transparency, trust, reliability, and security are essential in making it a huge success. The PayPal X Payments Platform’s Adaptive APIs provides all those essential features that any application would need in building a solid Peer-to-Peer financing platform. The Split Payments provide transparency, Preapprovals provide trust and security, Adaptive accounts provide validity of user accounts, and the PayPal’s strong and most robust security and fraud detection systems provide the security that any application would need.

At the Peer Financing Conference, I will present our new suite of PayPal X Adaptive APIs (Adaptive Payments and Adaptive Accounts) that will help developers innovate in financing. We will walk through the APIs and introduce the new Payment models (Parallel and Chained), Preapprovals, Refunds and Currency Conversion methods, and the account management features that would help developers in building cool new innovative applications and services in Peer-to-Peer financing. Also at the conference, Jason Korosec (General Manager for PayPal Platform) will be participating in a panel discussion on the future of Peer Financing.

At PayPal we strongly believe that developers are the core component of our ecosystem and the applications they build are essentially going to change the way we pay. We strive to provide whatever functionality and features they need to monetize their applications in a better way. We constantly work with developers to not only help them with our platform and APIs, but also to get their valuable feedback in what’s working and what’s not, and the functionality/features that they would like to see provided by our Platform.

At our company, 30 percent of our roadmap is based on the feedback from the developer community – that’s how serious we are about the developers and the applications they build. If you are attending the conference, and have a requirement or feature that you want to see supported by our Payments Platform, I would love to meet you in person and find out more.

Praveen Alavilli is the developer evangelist for the PayPal X Developer Network helping developers to monetize their ideas and applications using PayPal Payments Platform. Prior to PayPal, Praveen worked at Amazon.com and AOL as a System Architect designing and building Web Authentication and Identity systems. Praveen is an active member of several Internet Identity communities like OpenID and OAuth.