This is from Paypal official blog on the acquisition of Fig Card – mobile payment company.
In my job, I get the opportunity to talk with a lot of merchants. And they see the same thing we do…retail is changing quickly. The lines between online and offline commerce continue to blur – thanks in large part to technology innovation in mobile. PayPal is extremely focused on being at the center of this new retail landscape and driving innovation in mobile payments. That’s why I’m so excited to announce that PayPal has acquired Fig Card and welcomes two innovators and entrepreneurs to the PayPal Mobile team – Max Metral and Hasty Granbery.
Fig Card developed an extremely easy way for merchants to accept mobile payments in stores by using a simple and very low cost USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal. All the consumer needs is the Fig app on his or her smart phone. We loved their approach to point-of-sale, particularly because it was driven by the same vision that we have at PayPal – in the future, transactions can be as smart as a computer and not as dumb as paper. We won’t need our physical wallets. We’ll be able to pay any way we want, from any device, anywhere in the world with both flexibility and privacy.
Prior to founding Fig, Max and Hasty led a series of successful companies. Max was co-founder and CTO of Firefly, where he helped define many of the governing principles of privacy on the Web that are still used today. Firefly was sold to Microsoft, and he went on to architect Microsoft Passport, one of the first single sign-on systems.
Max and Hasty met at PeoplePC – another company that Max co-founded — which was sold to Earthlink. They reunited at a software platform company called Arts Alliance Labs, which Max also founded. While at Arts Alliance Labs, Hasty came up with the idea for Povo.com, a wiki for local businesses where users not only built the content but the functionality of the site as well.
Clearly, Max and Hasty have a successful track record working together as a team, and we can’t wait to see what they’ll come up with at PayPal!
There’s a lot of exciting innovation happening within the walls of eBay and PayPal – and even more so with the tens of thousands of developers who use our platform around the world. It’s inspiring to come to work every day and interact with some of the best minds in technology and payments. I couldn’t be more excited to welcome two more to the PayPal team.
– Peter Chu, senior director of PayPal Mobile